


Lancaster County

by raquelelpillo



Series: Lancaster County [1]
Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-24
Updated: 2010-05-25
Packaged: 2017-10-09 17:03:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 17
Words: 31,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/89678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raquelelpillo/pseuds/raquelelpillo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nix is born later. Dick is there. (AU)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Shakespearean Violence

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the summer of 1942 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

This was a moment where he could have used a lion's heart. Beneath the fist and the cut of words of a united enemy front, Lewis had given a noble resistance, but had quickly succumbed to the sheer numbers. Come on. Three, mangy-faced teenagers against one, peace-loving Nixon? No contest, really. Mostly because, at the sound of a knuckle happily splitting open on his jaw, fracturing his face with a fiery punch of pain, he saw little point to it all. Either he could grit his teeth and fight like a dog, lose, and have no energy to run—or he could make a more intelligent choice. But in light of the circumstances—blood dripping down over the ridge of his lip and through the cleft of his chin, every soft part of his body pummeled and his ankle throbbing in pain—there were no other choices but to curl up and wait for it to pass. So much for that brilliant strategy, goes the thought.

"Shit," Lewis gurgles out. That noise of pain earns him another sharp smack in the face. The blows themselves have weakened, but they strike places that already hurt, and he sees sparks fly behind his eyes and tastes odd things. Goddamn, but getting the shit beat out of you is almost Shakespearean.

He takes a boot to the back. They sneer. Nixon would laugh at the absolute absurdity of them—beating up a kid just because there's a dirty rumor attached to his name. True or not, who gives up a perfectly good Saturday to stalk and attack a kid younger than you? Only a few years before, during the Depression, wasting even one day that could have earned you some work was a crime against your family. Against your country, even. But here they are, chasing down the new, rich kid in town and calling him all sorts of colloquial things. None of which are flattering or clever and only satisfy their own insecurities.

There's a little irony in the fact that there's grass pressing against his face, fresh, cool dirt smearing across his face as he takes a firm beating. He'd come here for the summer to experience the simplicity of country life, and here he is, facedown and definitely experiencing it.

Eventually, they lose interest. They have to. Not even these guys can derive much entertainment out of a victim who will not cry out, beg, or even move. Lewis waits it out and when they finally go, kicking the dirt as they leave, he sits up. He then allows himself a disgusted puff of air. He drags the back of his fist along his nose, grimacing at the generous trail of blood it leaves. A few more splats of red fall onto his pants, and he swears under his breath.

He stands and continues walking as he had before he'd been so rudely interrupted. He knows the fury his aunt will look up on him with, seeing perfectly good khaki pants tainted by his own blood, a nice shirt ruined by a needless scuffle. Not that it matters, that bitch. Not like they ever had to worry about money or running out of it within the century. Sure, there were times when they couldn't afford a new painting for the living room, or a new set of china—but that was the worst of it. Lewis Nixon had never needed to pick cotton or grapes to stay alive and never would. But right now, he needed a good excuse. So, walking on in the full sun, he wipes the blood from his face as best he could and starts formulating a story.

Nowhere in that story had he thought to add a boy with hair the color of wheat at fiery sunset, but here he enters, sitting on the side of the road and watching Lewis walk by. Apparently just out to observe the summer scenery, bare toes stretched out, arms resting on his knees, squinting into the sun.

His figure grows closer until he can see the faint splash of freckles on his face, the worn dust of his clothing, the half-wild curl of his hair ruffled by wind and a youth spent freely. Well—more freely than any Nixon son, he supposes. Lewis stops in front of him and waits for a greeting. He's been watching him as soon as he came into sight—he could feel that—and now a pair of blue-green eyes watch him silently at close range.

It's almost infuriating, actually. The boy, roughly his own age by the looks of him, only tilts his head at him, considering him with the quietest little laugh in his eyes.

Lewis scrunches his face at him sourly. "What?" he demands. "You want a go, too? Well, shit. I don't care. Damage's been done."

The boy continues to stare silently for a moment, his small, drawn mouth twitching in amusement. Finally, he shakes his head. Lew has been wondering if he were only a mute, but is pleasantly proven wrong a moment later. "No, you look like you've got more than you know what to do with," he answers, twirling a blade of grass in his fingertips. With a twitch of the mouth and a momentary glance at the ground Lewis will come to know so well it almost becomes a rhythm—weird music, even—he collects his words and looks back up.

Suspicious, Lewis only scowls at him. "Yeah?" he prompts, when the green-blue of his eyes circles his face, no doubt inspecting the bruises and cuts he's incurred. "What do you want? If you don't have anything to say, then—"

"No, sorry," he answers, and rises off the ground. Thin, willowy limbs unfold into a tall, lanky creature with a flash of copper red hair, a slightly horsy face, and a thin, pursed mouth framed by dimples. He smiles with restraint at Nixon. Down at him. Lew doesn't like that he's got a good couple of inches on him, and he almost turns away and leaves. He's been harassed, beat, and made otherwise unwelcome—he doesn't need to stare at this strange kid's thin lips the color of summer peaches.

But the stranger sticks out his hand and smiles the best he can. It seems to catch on a fishhook on one side of his mouth. "Richard Winters," he introduces himself. "But call me Dick."

Lew turns back to face him and notices the crooked attempt at warmth. Somehow that halfway gawky teenager of a smile matched to a halfway gawky redhead, decorated by a splash of freckles, endears him enough to offer a hand in return.

"Nixon, Lewis Nixon," he answers. They clasp hands and shake briefly. For Nixon, it's a hollow imitation of his father, but for Dick, it's sincere and polite. He can feel that in the pressure of a farm-worn hand around his own. "Call me whatever."

"Good to know." Dick says and smiles. And immediately, that is it. They fall into step next to each other, and the red-headed native said nothing more about the ugly bruises and how he'd earned them, and Nixon did not ask if he'd been hanging around and seen more than he'd let on. They stroll off along the road as friendship begins as quiet and cautiously but unflinching as when Dick asks how Nixon came to be here. He answers, grinning lewdly, "My mother had this short dress, and my father was so far _gone_—"

Dick laughs.

"I meant—what brings you to Lancaster?"

He glances steadily back and forth from this new companion and the road beneath his feet as he speaks. "Well, it's nearly the same story—my father's still pretty far gone, you can say. Wanted me gone for the summer—experience new places and all that. My mother's always wanted to 'go the countryside,' " he says, almost grimacing at her choice of words, "but you're not going to see her doing anything but sitting by the window and gossiping about the women back home. And you're probably not going to see me shooting the shit with the locals, either."

Lew cocks an eyebrow at him. The bruises' truer colors are suddenly clearer to Dick. For a moment, there is a glimmer of comprehension and vivid amusement so sharp and clear it should belong on a boy much older. He catches sight of it before those pumpkin-red eyelashes blink closed and upon opening again disguise it. Then he twists one side of his mouth at him.

"Good to know," is all he says on the subject and they change it.

"Ever been swimming before, then?" Dick asks. They are walking together with no destination, and he hopes to steer it somewhere.

Lew, of course, smirks fiercely and makes the smart remark, "For God's sake, Dick, I'm rich and sheltered, not a prisoner in my own home."

"A pool is nothing like the real thing."

"Have you been to a pool?" Lew asks.

Dick's mouth tangles a little. "Well, have you ever been to the real thing?"

Lew grins and slaps him on the shoulder, bending forward to laugh. "I like this kid already," he half-mutters to himself.


	2. Count the Freckles

Fearless freckles—that ought to be his name. He undresses with no fear of burning himself. Nixon notes the vulnerable complexion with a quirk of his mouth when the white shirt comes off. His paleness shines like a mirror and momentarily it's too much to look at. He instead scrutinizes the blood splatter on own his shirt sleeve and wonders just how long the lecture will run when he finally returns home. Despite himself, the ruby spots of freckles catch his eye again and he grimaces happily. A simpler solution would be to simply never return home.

Before he's seriously tempted, he diverts himself with a sidelong glance at his newly found friend. Dick tosses his shirt to the grass and works on kicking off his dust-worn jeans.

"Lived here a long time?" Lew asks. He cranes his neck to glance over his shoulder at the nearby dirt road, while rustling of clothing fill his ears.

"All my life," comes the answer. Denim flies as Dick kicks off his jeans, successfully landing them across a low branch hanging over the water. From his angle of view, Nix sees his jaw tense, transformed by what must be a hidden grin of victory. When he turns to ask if Nix will be joining him, a question he'll mostly ask with the blue of his eyes, he's wiped it off.

"And you?" Dick asks.

"I'm not getting my clothes dirty—I'll catch hell as it is." The freckles dusting his shoulder and nose distract him from the thin black fabric swimming trunks that call out for his attention in a terrible little voice. A skimpy little voice that dares him to count the freckles that decorate his thighs. Lew folds his arms loosely and refuses to cave to their demands.

The Lancaster native smirks as he resists another outright laugh. Always polite, that one. Nix already recognizes the jerk of his chin to the left that denotes amusement, the furrowing of one brow that balances the motion. He walks fearlessly across the rocky rim of the pond to come close enough for the green spots in his eyes to show. "Alright." A few white toes disappear under the water, turning ghostly pale. "Where do you live? When you're not busy making friends on back roads, of course."

Nixon blinks silently at him for a few moments when he realizes the hint of a smile is quietly referring to his 'friendly' encounter before stumbling across the redhead. He doesn't know why his heart is thudding so painfully.

"New Jersey," he says. "Nixon, New Jersey." He has to resist the ease to wince and nurse one of his wounds.

Eyebrow sinks. Amusement simmers in his stare. Lew swallows and tries not to remember the color of his freckles complementing that look so vividly by looking at the water with caution. He collaborates on the subject when Dick issues a low whistle, impressed by the distance. "Family friend owns a horse farm near by—we're staying with them."

"Until?"

"End of the summer, I'm guessing."

"And you're making your time spent here worth the trip, I suppose."

The hint of a grin is too much. "Yeah, yeah," Lew grimaces and finally breaks, throwing his hands onto his hips. "You can say something about it, okay.? I don't give a damn. I'm not going to cry, for Christ's sake—and I'm not going to stutter and try to hide why."

Dick seems unfazed by any display, warm or bitter or otherwise. He simply turns and begins wading in the water. "Colin and Michael are always eager to make trouble," he says calmly. "I'm sure they believed they had valid reasons to hurt you and intimidate you, but mostly they love a good sin. Your accent would be reason enough for them." When the water reaches his knees, he bends down and runs his hands through it.

Only then does the sight of water tempt Lewis. Might sooth the burning ache where knuckles bit into his face and the leather of boots left their mark. He wanders closer to it, until the water laps at his shoes. He fakes a grimacing smile and larks in a cheerful tone. "Ah, familiar with my new best friends?"

Dick snorts. "Small town. For better or worse, everyone knows every one else."

The wisdom in his voice feels cool, comforting to his ears as water is to his sun-crisped skin and Lew can't resist but draw closer to his new friend. The title, echoing only within is own mind, seems fitting. In fact, inspires him to join him. Black, polished shoes are toed off and discarded. Nix doesn't pay any attention to where they fall in a bout of determined rebellion. The calculated and disappointed burn of his father's stare may bully him into orderly submission when he is home, but they cannot keep his shoes tied to his feet here. In fact, he can't keep anything on him or do a goddamned thing about it. That fact, paired with the freckles he can see in his mind's eye, is freeing.

Nixon shrugs of his shirt, deliberately balls it up, and tosses it to the ground behind him. "Alright, move over. I'm ready to be shown the light," he says as he steps cautiously into the water. When Dick looks up at him, still bent with a palm pressed flat to the surface, he grins fiercely. "Apparently the real thing's much better, or so I've heard." He's careful not to step to heavily or quickly and dash the underside of his feet on some bitter little rock.

The sun is crawling towards midday height. Consequentially, the water shines green-blue behind Dick Winters, forming a pastoral little halo of color and light and calmness. It seems to suit him, and he reflects a little of that grin back to Lewis. He watches him toddle carefully out into the water with his pants rolled to his knees. He's also keeping a cautious distance between them.

"The water doesn't bite," he says. Nixon is wincing a little at the chilly temperature and rough ground as he walks slowly out.

"I don't want to get my clothes wet."

"But you're not afraid to throw them into the dirt?"

"Of course not—the dirt's not freezing cold!"

Dick laughs and his palm reaches into the water, flinging a handful towards Nix.

"God damn it, man!" he yelps, jumping tenderly away. "That's cold."

"That's the real stuff," the redhead answers in return. "It's easier to take all at once, you know." And he demonstrates by bending forward towards Nixon and diving in with a tremendously awkward splash that reaches all the way to the cautious newcomer—successfully dousing him and eliciting a fresh curse.


	3. Over-privileged

He finally decides to part with Dick when the sun drowsily sinks away, reminding him of the vague promise he'd thrown back at his mother when he swept enthusiastically out the door, eager to be free of her. Mostly, he'd lied, muttering, "Okay," just to expedite the goodbye. Full on Mideastern sunshine, satisfied with an afternoon of freckles and water, and forgetful of his bruises, Nixon feels unusually generous towards his nagging mother.

"My old lady'll kill me if I'm not back soon."

Luckily, he senses the same decision from his new friend, who agrees with only a small, reserved smile he turns towards the side of Lew's face. He hums a note of agreement and nods, turning his stare back out onto the water. They'd been sitting in silence for a while, staring reverently at the water as sunlight drained into the horizon. The surface is deceptively still—only a little time before it'd been a mock battle ground, where Nixon had finally succeeded in wrangling Dick into a vice grip and dunking him all the way to his fire-wheat hair. By then, the setting sun had lit the water ablaze to match.

Lew lets out a long breath and hops off the fence. His clothes, which had been laid out on a rock after a truce had been formed, have dried in the sun. There is little more visible damage than a mild water stain around the hems of his khaki pants and one vivid stain of blood on his sleeve. He lifts them and punches out the stiffness in them with a smirk.

"Ha. Maybe I'll live to see tomorrow yet," he jokes.

Dick bends forward and rests his elbows on his knees, balancing himself by hooking his feet underneath the bottom rung. He clasps his palms together and nods, chuckling mutely to himself. Lew doesn't see this, nor the thoughtful blue-green of his stare, while he throws on his shirt.

The khaki pants get a little more inspection before they get shrugged back on, brushing the dirt from them to ensure it's not another incriminating stain, and shoes pulled from the grass. Lew holds those with the hook of a finger in each, and turns to face him. The dying sunlight burns bright red on his hair, obscuring his freckles, and Nixon's almost sad to see them go. Here is where it should be awkward. His words should be stutter stepping over unfamiliarity and strangeness when he says, "See you tomorrow," but they aren't.

Hell, he hadn't even thought about if he'd actually see him again. I guess so, Lew concedes to himself, and Dick smirks back at him in response. He answers slowly, as if taking to allow Lew to revoke the offer if he should abruptly change his mind. "Sure."

He nods, receives a nod in confirmation, and that's where they part. He turns and walks off, and Dick lifts his legs and hops off the fence, heading barefoot and brave through a field towards his own home, a few rolling hills of crops away.

Nixon begins the trek towards the distant lights of the farm where he's staying, knowing full well he'll never make it there at a decent hour at his current pace. Should he run, he might. But the intoxicating summer sun has filled him too full and he is sleepy and sated as if he'd just wolfed down a Christmas dinner. He forgets completely that he hasn't had a bite to eat for hours—a first in his life, he's sure. The only thing more obnoxious than a mother hen is a mother hen with the financial power to indulge all her worrying and coddling—channeling her worry and her insecurities into cooking constantly. _Only the best for her baby boy, of course. _

He'll also forget completely about the array of bruises and the neatly split lip until he's on the porch, and the door's swinging open.

_Those freckles be damned_, he thinks for a moment, forcing them out of his mind to better face his mother's impending wrath.

\---

Nixon doesn't escape his mother's punishment until he's scraped half of his aunt's stables for straw and shit. The sun's already hanging high when he emerges from the stable doors. He squints at the sudden overload of light, toiling away since the unfair hours of the morning in the dim corridors. He wants a cold bath of water to wash him clean more than anything. A low, rumbling of hunger from his gut tells him it must be past mid-day. Meaning he's spent nearly five hours at the mercy of the digestive tracks of twenty-five unappreciative thoroughbreds.

Nix pushes up his sleeves again and grimaces at the sweat on his arms and face as he tries to wipe it clean. He wanders from the stables towards the house. When he strides up the porch and stops at the open door—still quite aware of the miserable state of the underside of his boots—and no one answers his call inside, he scowls unhappily. "Hello?" he tries again.

He claps his hands on the doorframe in order to lean in further. Usually, he can hear his mother twittering and laughing with his aunt from some room in the house, beside a pitcher of lemonade or wine, but the house seems awfully silent. "Anybody there?" Only the pale blue wallpaper and the ugly white floral pattern tracing into the most distant corners answer him and he gladly gives up.

Knowing his mother, after issuing him his punishment the night before, had probably spent the rest of the night courting a glass of red wine and gossiping. She'd probably slept long into the morning, dragging herself out of bed only to eagerly take Aunt Mabel into town for shopping. Aunt, of course, being an affectionate title for a stranger Lewis knew only as the woman in his childhood memories who dragged him up from his seat on the floor by his armpits, and invaded his space with an obnoxious kiss on each cheek. _Worse than the damn Nazis_, that woman, deciding simply to scoop him up like an eager snatch of territory, only to nearly drop him when the coddling whim had left her for a flirtatious one. Nixon drops all thoughts of wars he's never paid much attention to—much less fought, having been eleven or twelve when Czechoslovakia found itself a new wing of Germany.

Nixon gladly turns away from the doorframe and begins to lumber down the stairs. With work finished—at least until someone catches him without some and gives him another vicious assignment—his body unwinds and his feet grow heavy. So heavy he stops on the stairs and sits, kicking off his boots as quickly as his aching body will permit. Bits of manure and straw cling to the bottom and form a ragged snowshoe's ring. No need to keep those anywhere near him. They land off in the grass in front of the porch.

His toes, normally pink and white, are red from heat and appear as miserable as the rest of him. As muggy as it is, the summer air burns cool on the sweat collected there, and he loosens up enough to lay across the steps, elbows locked back to support him and legs splayed out. He stops to push his sleeves up to his elbows and rubs his hair and temples free of sweat. The shadow cast by the porch cuts him neatly in half.

_All in all, better than getting beat up by some goddamn philistines…_

And so, with a tired, heat-soaked smirk, he lays back and dozes there for as long as he has the good luck to stay that way.

It takes him a while to notice the quiet sound in his mind. Sometime after closing his eyes and resting in the endless black ocean he found there, letting color and noise filter in and replace thought and dreaming, he feels it. He's too damn content here—or at least, as content as he's been all morning, with horse shit and his Mother's shit driving him to curse under his breath—to pay attention. It doesn't shrill, ring, or thud. It comes to be, appearing out of nothing but seeming to belong all at the same time. And it keeps trying to get his attention, like a gently nagging thought.

Finally, Nixon scrunches his face and opens his eyes as the sound kindly asks. He blinks a few times, tilting his head, to make sure that the redhead standing next to his boots isn't a summer mirage, like the shimmering silver of burning water on blacktop in the distance that dissolves into nothing the closer it comes.

"Hey," Dick greets him evenly. He pulls his mouth into a gentle shape, as if he were waking a sick child.

"Hey," Nixon responds. The sound of his voice is thick, rolling out of his throat like gravel. He must have been out. "Shit," he grumbles, sitting up to realize that the rigidity of the stairs and the soreness of his muscles had not been making friends with each other in his sleep. A few more ugly faces loosens his face and he manages to half-grimace, half-smirk back at Dick. The redhead is watching him with intent, but Nixon gives little mind.

"Damn—you know what time it is?" he asks.

Dick glances upwards only with his brows, exposing the blue-green of his eyes to summer's full color, flashing like wildflowers in a crop field. "Two?" he guesses, and immediately looks back at him, barely able to keep his long face from a breaking out in a grin. "Done with your workload for the day, I see."

"Matter of fact, I am. Whole place could burn down, but I'm done caring for today," Lew answers. "Two? Must have been out a while, then. You haven't seen an over-privileged woman with the devil in her eyes stomping around here, have you?"

Finally, the grin breaks, and Lew watches the sun break, although it already hovers high. "Actually, I met your mother on the road. Couldn't place where I'd seen that over-privileged face before, though. All clear now."

"Shut up," Nixon slings at him, but the only thing that aggravates him is how not aggravated he feels after being woken from a nap by what could have only been the color of the Lancaster's eyes calling him in his sleep.


	4. Common Sense

Despite all his plans, Lewis Nixon finds himself carefully resisting the onslaught of horse smell again as he sits on an uncomfortable bale of hay in the barn's main corridor. Rather than build a tolerance from his morning of work, his senses seem to buckle underneath the musty smell. Not that Dick Winters would be bothered—of course—his sleeves pushed up, freckled skin not yet sweating—with his hands smoothing out the shuddering skin of a thoroughbred. Dick tugs at the lead rope, checking the knot, and the mare swings her head towards him as if he were about to whisper some juicy secret. The velvet of her nose knocks him gently under the chin, and he smiles and pats her neck.

Nixon decides he's jealous of the ease with which he's calmed this horse, when he'd spent the morning attempting in vain to coax horse after goddamned horse out of their stall for cleaning and receiving stuttering feet and bony legs firmly planted in the corner. Not the fact that when the mare indulges her curiosity for the taste of his pale plaid shirt and cranes her neck to nibble at his arm, he smiles again and nudges her away like an overly affectionate girl. When he reaches down for the bucket of supplies at his feet, Nixon can no longer remain silent.

"Why didn't you just tell me yesterday?" he asks. Not that he's sullen—the heat simply makes him appear that way. Careful not to inhale too deeply or stare too pointedly at the nape of the redhead's neck, he pulls a knee up onto the bale and rests his arm against it.

"About working here?" Dick begins combing through her short summer coat without looking back at him. In the dimmed sunlight of the barn, it's the color of thick blood, turning ink black at the extremities. "Wasn't an issue."

"I said I was staying here. Now, unless you suffer from a highly convenient case of short-term memory loss, you knew."

Dick lifts his brows toward the curve of the mare's back, a quietly amused motion Nixon wouldn't see. "I didn't think it was an issue," he said, the side of his mouth lifting of it's own volition as he spoke.

Nixon grimaces to himself with a barely restrained flash of embarrassment, which Dick, in turn, would not see either. "Forget it."

"Part time," Dick elaborates, as he pats off the back and continues combing over her highly bred haunches. Nixon listens eagerly, but the embarrassed section of his mind shirks, being reminded of the strange neediness he'd shown only minutes before. "I come here a few days a week and help out with grooming and exercises. Extra cash, something to do." Nixon remains determinedly silent, still pushing blood away from the tips of his ears, and Dick smiles again.

"You asked to see each other again, and I was sure we would. So, that's what I said," he explains. "Work and visiting just happened to coincide."

He finally turns his head around and curls one corner of his mouth, his dimples deep and captivating, as bold as plow-driven lines. "How's that for a five-dollar word, Nix?"

Lewis avoids the question with a puff of half-disgruntled air. Part of him remains unconvinced that Dick had any intention of seeing him again, only uttering an affirmative to keep him quiet, and the other part is disgusted with his fixation. He juts his jaw into palm. He winces and draws back, forgetting the painful bruise along his jaw where a pair of bored philistines had attempted to bash out his teeth.

The blood bay mare snorts and tosses her hair, which Dick smoothes out and quickly brushes clear of tangles and tiny bits of straw. He drops the brush into the bucket and pulls a metal pick from the array of items, none of which Nixon has ever seen before. And proceeds to wag it—as if it were actually enticing in some manner—towards him as an invitation.

"Too comfortable to take a stab at it?"

Lew grimaces. "In what way do I look comfortable?" The heat and the barely subdued embarrassment compel him to throw his hands up in the air. "No, Dick, I'm happier than a pig in shit."

Dick's expression is ever even and clear, unaffected by the churlish tone of Nixon's voice. "I thought that learning something might interest you more than just sight-seeing."

"By all means, Professor," Nixon drawls. "What's today's lesson, then?"

"Hoof Pick, 101," Dick answers, and tosses the instrument to him. Every motion he commits to—the hook-efficient curl of his mouth, bending to reach, nudging an overeager girlfriend of a mare's nose away—is so constant and measured it's mesmerizing to see. Nixon wonders if he can stumble of any way and, as he catches the foreign object, decides to watch for one. The polished wooden handle holds a residual spot of warmth from the shape of Dick's hand around it. Nixon rubs the spot absently as he stands up. It's either learn something and occupy his mind, or sit motionless in the heat, smelling horse and horse shit, and trace where the red-gold hairs end on Dick's neck with his eyes over and over again. He chooses to learn.

Dick Winters is only a year or two older—as far as he can tell, by the density of his freckles and the young, round shape of his eyes, awkward-sized hands—but far too eager to teach in Nixon's opinion. He's strangely happy at this acceptance, the previously neglected corners of his smile suddenly being explored. Grinning like an English teacher discussing Shakespeare.

"Cleaning the hoof. It's important, after standing in the stall all night, to clear them of debris," he says and his voice is the sound of composure. Nixon turns the tool over and arches a brow.

"All well and good, Prof," he says, wagging the pick. "But aren't their feet soft under the hoof? I wouldn't exactly pick my teeth with something like this."

Dick shakes his head and pats the mare again, her blood-colored flesh shuddering beneath the touch. He continues to stroke down the length of her leg, bending to grip gently around the bony shape of her ankle, only applying a lover's hint of pressure before she obeys and curls the leg. Tendon and bone collapses neatly into a crooked 'g' shape and the bottom of her foot turns upward. Dirt, straw, and evidently her own feces are caked inside the crescent-moon shape of her foot, completing the circle of the hoof.

Nix falls into place next to Dick and watches carefully.

"Everything cakes here, in the center of the toe. Neglect it, and she can develop infections, other problems. Nothing we can't avoid by simply cleaning it out regularly. Otherwise, it doesn't hurt them."

Nix snorts and pauses to stare at him, treating him to the same skeptical angle of his raised brow. "I'm not that much of a senseless city slicker, Dick," he says, administering a half-chastising little jab with the curve of the pick. "I get it."

Dick smirks at him and mutely reaches for the tool, watching Nixon for a moment that seems impossibly slow in the humid summer air. He then positions himself, leaning gently against the horse, facing opposite directions, bony knee lodged between his thighs as his hands cleared out the packed straw and dirt. Rather than note the exertion it took to manage that stance—muscles drawn tight, knees bent, feet flat, torso stretched forward, shoulders rolling, tensing, moving—he instead observes the hoof. The pick cuts through and flings the dirt away. Yellowish, spongy flesh becomes visible; the singular, arched toe becomes apparent among it all.

"Huh. What do you know? They actually do have only one toe," he mutters.

A successful demo spurs Dick to start another. He tugs the loose end of the knot anchoring the thoroughbred to the corridor wall and it falls apart with no more effort than a flicked wrist. He doesn't ask if Nixon wants to be taught—he understands that despite the quiet sort of derisive humor Nixon likes to throw about he's sincerely open to learn, and quick to catch on. Leaning close beside, shoulders nearly always touching now like an extra conduit to exchange information, Dick teaches him the emergency pull knot. Easy enough to undo should a flash fire break loose but not simple enough to fall apart at the curious pull of a horse's mouth. He's known it for years, and his fingers move quickly through it on instinct. Nixon attempts it after the first demo, then begrudgingly asks to see it again and slower.

Dick tests his next attempt, and it falls neatly apart as it should. "Good." Partly through his tone, and partly through the conduit of touch they now maintain, standing close around the same knot, Nixon feels him swell with a little pride. "At this rate, you'll be a seasoned farm hand."

"Right," Lew scoffs. "Leave the family, set up shop on a patch of dust and raise beans 'til the end of days. Just what Dad always envisioned of his Nixon boy."

Dick shakes his head and shrugs the implications away. He chooses to overlook the half-bitter music in Nixon's voice that suggests a veiled interest in doing just that. If only to infuriate a father he's been unable to speak well of in all the time they've known each other.

Which is only a few days, Dick has to remind himself again. One, not even two.

He nudges Nixon out of his potential tangent and points towards the lead rope hanging from the opposite wall. "Go and hook that one to her halter if you would. Then we'll wash her down and be done."

"Right."

Lewis Nixon by no means is experienced on a farm. True, he has enough sense not to bend beneath the tied lead rope and the horse's neck to cross to the other side—but in all his intellectuality, verses of literature and history, no one had ever warned him to walk clear of a horse's hindquarters. No one had ever informed him they would instinctively kick should a stranger startle them by passing to closely. Common sense in his world differs from the common sense of Dick's. So, Nix follows the path that would logically take him the quickest to the other side, to best follow Dick's request, and skims just behind the mare.

Dick feels her body shudder again, as Nixon's boot rubs against her shin, a shiver that bolts upwards through her leg, runs beneath her shuddering withers, and knocks her head upwards like a vicious uppercut to the chin. The white of her eye flashes, her muscles tensing and dancing, prepared to strike out in a startled jerk. Without thinking, Dick lunges forward and drags him backwards by the waist.

The mare grumbles loudly and starts about, wheeling away from the sudden movement. A moment later, she imparts them with an annoyed snort and settles.

Dick watches her carefully, let out a similar relieved puff of air that blows across the back of Lew's head, black hair bending like prairie grass. The New Jersey native then shudders like horseflesh. It's only a moment later that Dick realizes he's still wrapped around him, and Nix remembers himself enough to pull away.

Veins as now warm as the color of Dick's hair, Nix steps away from him with an half-hidden awkward puff of air.

"You okay?"

Nix looks up at him and cocks an eyebrow. "Yeah." He sighs and rubs the back of his neck. "Call to the Nixon New Jersey glue factory and I'll be as right as rain," he mutters, and the mare grumbles back, tossing her tail. There is another gentle look that Lew will miss when Dick pats the mare's back and neck, watching him over his shoulder for any real harm done.

He uses the incident for the rest of the day as an excuse to keep watching him, reaching out and clapping a hand on his shoulder.


	5. The Brightness of Alcohol

There are years and years of color in Dick Winter's eyes, he's decided. They go on and on, painted by time and experience and the pregnant glory of stories he's yet to tell. Lewis finds himself looking over into them more than he feels he ought to, but—grinning lopsidedly around the mouth of the bottle—it could be the stolen nature of his drink coming back to haunt him. He chuckles freely at that, taking comfort in the privacy of his own thoughts as he kicks back another swig.

At first the alcohol is as unromantic as his father's expressions and tones, bitter and strong. It seems to fight back like a living creature being devoured alive, pushing towards freedom even when he'd swallowed it. But—and this is the magical thing about it—mouthful-by-mouthful it changes his perception. Each mouthful is still staunch and bitter, but he tastes only sweet, warm, and bright. It beckons more. He blinks heavily, having just finished a particularly long streak without a break for air—like Dick sometimes did underwater while swimming, absolutely refusing to break surface until he'd reached whatever he wanted in the depths of the summer rivers they frequented. Then he feels a bubble of alcoholic air pop out of his mouth, and laughs.

Dick Winters sits beside him. He finds the bottle of beer more comfortable in his hand instead, the cool glass sweating over his fingers in the humidity of the night. It's open, and nearly full. He's never really enjoyed a drink. It's not his first time taking a few illicit sips, but it is the first time he's had Lewis Nixon leading the expedition and drinking himself into a delirious joy, so it's better.

For his sake, Dick tips the bottle to his mouth again and sips down some, smiling sideways at Lew.

"Enjoyed yourself enough yet?" he asks. He can't quite bring himself to be reprimanding. Losing that cloudy laughter seems a higher price to pay than a little sickness later on, but he has to ask.

The bottle finally manages to rest while Nixon lets out another belch, the only interruption to his long, low laugh that hasn't managed to stop since he abruptly knocked Dick's bottle while he was drinking, half-choking him.

"I'm enjoying for both of us at this point," Nix says, looking over at him. "You could pretend you like the stuff. Or you could just give it to me."

Dick shakes his head, the red of his hair gone dusty in the dark light of a June night in an overgrown field. For a moment, while groping for his drink again as he develops a rhythm, Nixon's unable to stop noticing all the colors he's got, dim under the moonlight but brightened by stolen alcohol. Dick pretends not to notice Lew staring again, and instead looks dutifully out over the expanse of grass and brush to the dim shape of the farmhouse from which they'd crept.

Nixon laughs at the intense scrutiny even the sleeping dark around them gets, pale red brows tightening slightly, small mouth pressing in on itself in thought, and he falls backwards onto the ground. Suddenly, the brightness of alcohol has seeped into in his mind, and even the slightest motion in his friend's face is a source of humor, quiet and irresistible all at once. Without bothering to ask, Dick shakes his head and sighs gently.

"You're drinking too fast," comes the warning which Lew can barely hear now, lulled instead by the cloud of soft, white noises of the night and the drumbeat of his blood in his veins. He giggles at Dick, and earns another cautionary look. The laughter grows instead, if only because Dick looks at him so prettily when he laughs, wrestling against a look of affection when he knows he should scowl and discourage him.

Or is it my drunken state? Or the bruises? Still not gone, and it's been two weeks.

Nixon decides that the reason is irrelevant, instead occupying himself with his newest dilemma: accessing the lip of the bottle while lying down. Alcohol is not a proper liquid to bathe oneself. It's meant to make Dick's green-blue eyes more of each and the night warmer.

Ever since he had the misfortune to enduring the welcome of the area intolerants and bullies, and the good fortune to come across Dick Winters because of it, they've been inseparable.

_Nixon sits patiently on his hay bale perch—mostly observing in safety now—when Dick tends to the horses, waiting more patiently for them to stop shuddering and snickering happily under his touch, waiting for his turn as Dick's center of attention._

_Dick carefully watches Lew's fingertips when they tie up their fishing hooks, bare feet hanging side by side over the same rocky ledge, remembering vividly the pained bark he issued upon first accidentally spearing himself, jabbing his thumb sullenly into his mouth._

_Nixon stops and looks down in surprise from the tree branch where he'd climbed out of curiosity for the view, and sees Dick stroll off, ignoring Nix calling after him to wait, god damn him, falling neatly off the branch in his hurry and landing on his ass, but hobbling dedicatedly after. _

_Dick smiles and asks to be allowed in the mornings he doesn't work—and Nixon isn't already sitting on the porch railing, kicking impatiently—and waits until he's out of sight, obscured by the staircase, to begin to run and clap a sleeping Lew on the hip to wake him. _

_Nixon listens intently to everything Dick says, because he seems to cultivate every word before speaking, only taking the time to say them if they're worth saying. He knows some of the things Dick tries to teach him, but he knows none of the place he takes him--a brotherly, freckled, sun-kissed guide in a rural world which doesn't bear the mark of Nixon at every twist and turn. Sometimes he wishes he could convey how grateful he is for that at times, and sometimes he wishes he would ask Dick exactly what color his hair is, if only for posterity and absolute accuracy._

_Dick always laughs when Nixon jokes, the color in his eyes shifting happily, his mouth quirking, brow softening—and once when he's not._

("Wanna stay here for a night?" he had asked, and, of course, Dick couldn't deny him that, when they depart at the same fence every evening and meet again at the crack of dawn. It was saving on commute time.)

The same sensation had overwhelmed him when Nixon lowered his head to whisper near Dick's neck as they lay next to each other beneath the bulky comfort of his aunt's quilt, and asked if he really wanted to sleep. He'd rolled his head to face him, miscalculated, overshot, brushing the tip of his nose along his forehead, the dark fringe of his bangs encountering his own. He wondered if Lew had felt the same shock of embarrassment, bright and loud, sounding once in the pit of his stomach, and asked calmly what he meant. And, one covert mission later, Nixon had ushered him out the back door, a few bottles of beer to split among them.

Now, essentially having consumed all but one bottle of their spoils, Lewis Nixon is dizzy and happy. It's not such a bad thing, when Dick ignores the impending prospect of guiding his friend back home again without being found out.

The space between the stars is blue and black, but the halo around the full moon is strong silver, illuminating them on the knoll. Nixon hiccups again, and Dick sucks down another bitter ounce or two for his sake, though his eyes have fallen closed and his dizzy laughter fades. The dark of his hair turns silvery-blue, his skin mimicking the buckskin of the gelding he'd fed that morning, with Nixon himself turning secret, sneering faces at him for delaying his friend.

"Dick…?"

"Hmm?" he asks, mouth still full.

Nixon remains nearly motionless, unable to remember what he'd wanted to ask. Sleep and alcohol weigh his head down until he presses his cheek to the ground, facing his friend. "Never mind," he grumbles in return, smacking his lips a few times before he releases a deep, drowsy sigh.

Dick hardly wants to disturb him, but, watching the moonlight wash out his colors, he can't help but ask his own question. There's one thing he knows he won't answer truthfully at any other time—telling by the half-sullen, half-hurt look he adopts whenever the topic of his bruises arise—and, seeing how he's going to drag him home to bed, he decides he's owed one answer. Even if it's out of drunkenness. "Lew?"

"Yeah?" he grunts, barely able to push the noise out of his mouth.

"Why did they hurt you?"

Nix arches his brows in his sleep, lids still plastered securely shut. Dick draws closer, pressing his arm on the ground beside him, leaning closer to hear.

"…rich kid, they said. Didn't like my face. Said I looked like some fag," he mutters, managing to form a few coherent words, eyes peeking blearily open, and spot Dick's hazy figure near.

He crawls closer then, knocking over his bottle—despite it being practically bone dry—and lays his head on Dick's knee, grasping at his leg as if possessively snatching at his pillow in a shared bed. Sighs again—that deep sigh of dreams about to be dreamt—and Dick touches the bruises on his face and neck for a minute, cataloging them, before waking him.

"Time to head home, Lew."

"You're a lousy pillow…giving…orders all the time."


	6. I Am the Message

"It'll have to wait, Nix. I've got work to do back home first."

For a moment, Dick can barely withstand the pain of observing that bruised mouth tighten in a genuine twitch of disappointment, but Nix is just as quick to wash it off with nonchalance as he had been that first day they'd met—and as fiercely as he'd scrubbed the blood from his face, standing ankle-deep and bending to grasp at the water.

"Yeah," he says distantly. The noise of his voice seems to make an unwanted jump across the adjoining hallway, where Nixon can see his mother's head turn slightly towards them. "Alright." He says it quickly, painlessly, hoping to lose her attention.

Discouraged and awkward—the first time he's yet 'no' from Dick Winters in all that he's known him; even when he proposed a night of thievery and underage drinking, he'd smiled in good nature and joined—Nixon turns towards the sink and idly runs the tap. With a sigh, Dick stands from the table where they'd breakfasted, his empty plate in hand. He stands beside Lew to politely drop his used plate in the second sink, and they connect at the shoulder.

"I'll be back in a few hours," he says. He doesn't move from that spot, waiting for confirmation in Nixon's face. "If you still want to go." He'd honestly wanted to see Nixon sit, cautious and wary and begrudgingly enjoying himself, on the back of a horse beside his own.

"Nah, don't need to. Unlike you, I enjoyed myself a little too much last night, and I'd still be sleeping it off if it weren't for you. Probably close my eyes until it's dark again."

"It shouldn't take long—"

"Nah." Nixon shakes his head like he's trying to shake water off his nose. "Get, for God's sake." It's a motion that haunts him repeatedly that day, more like he's trying to shed the green-yellow bruises as a horse shakes a rider. More and more, their color makes Dick's fingers twitch at his sides in violent curls.

In the few weeks since his arrival, the bruises that had welcomed him to Lancaster have dimmed in intensity, but turned sickly green at the edges, the center a washed yellow Dick wishes matched the rest of him. But they had been ugly, bites of blue-purple interrupting the flushed red of his face in the summer heat, offsetting the balance of color in his face. And they hurt. Not that a Nixon boy—especially not Mrs. Nixon's baby boy—would admit it, but the winces slip through when Nixon wipes the sweat from his brow and encounters them too roughly.

Again, his fingers twitch into a fist, but they clench around the metal handle of a small saw as he walks down a half overgrown path along the local stream. The soft, dense grass has parted and a scalp of a worn path is growing in between—it's a known location for fishermen and ambitious young men with pretty girls alike, the former for the morning and evening, and the latter for the romantic center of night. Here in the daylight Dick Winters walks out onto the small wooden pier jutting into a wide but sheltered section, noting the new tackle box resting in the weeds. There's even a pole waiting near the edge of the dock, the cut line resting on the water's surface.

He remembers the circles of injury lining Lew's face, like the contour lines of a topographical map, marking the highest, worst moment since he's known him, and he strips off his trousers and shirt. Down to the black of his swimming shorts, Dick sits on the edge of the dock, grabs the saw, and eases down into the water.

He remembers the smear of red on the back of his hand after wiping his mouth with a surly sneer as he'd come down the road, interrupting Dick's quiet afternoon on the bank with an noise that was both denying and playing up his pain. He trudges through the water, lapping at his collarbone as he holds the metal saw aloft, and ducks beneath the dock. He remembers how bright those bruises had been when he'd woken in the morning, rolled over, and looked at Nixon, still asleep. They'd been so green and sickly in the newly born sunlight, so dark and ominous in the night before, his heavy head resting on his knee.

He braces the wood with his palm pressed flat against it, and begins to saw a line perpendicular down the middle of the dock's wooden ribs. He saws for a short time, then moves down to another board, sawing only enough to weaken it, not cut it. He saws three—halfway between the shore and the edge of the dock.

Then he pulls himself out of the water and sits on the edge of the dock. He waits for Colin Burnfield and Michael Lichten to come back and fish, as they do almost every summer's day. Until then, he remembers.

\---

The bed, which is a leftover when the teenage son of the house had left for exploits unknown, is pushed into the corner of the room, the window just to the right illuminating the emptiness around it. Aside from the dark-haired lump beneath the covers and his friend lying beside him, there is no sign that Lewis Nixon lives there at all. The original coat of white paint is eroded away in great, ragged chunks, until the walls resemble the disputed borders of countries Dick's only read about. There's an empty desk, a thin-legged chair it's only companion; a quilt chest sits at the foot of the bed, and that's where Nixon stores his things, tucked away, out of sight. His extraneous clothes lie together in a pile beside the bed, a reminder that tugs at the corner of Dick's mouth.

Transformed by too much alcohol Nixon had become elbows and senseless knees. As much as he'd bragged of similar outings in New Jersey in a town named after him he'd had no time to build much of a tolerance. They'd left the bottles to be overgrown and consumed by the weeds and Dick had slung Nix's arm across his shoulder, hooking his arm around and underneath his friend's, and guided him back home. And, when he'd been prepared to drop dead asleep in his jacket and boots, he'd pulled him back off the bed enough to convince him out of his outermost shell of clothes and unlace and remove his boots.

Dick blinks into the morning light and sits up slightly, glancing around the room. The shape of the clock hands across the room tell him it's not too late, and the lack of motion besides him tells him it's too early, as well.

He turns over to observe his friend's state, rather than immediately spring to life.

He's managed to wrangle most of the quilt away from Dick in the course of the night, bundling them so that they nearly engulf him, save for the mussed black of his hair. Shoulder high against his cheek, Nixon sleeps like a child, preparing to be woken at any moment, stealing blankets and burying into them. He presses his head so forcefully into the pillow in his relaxation that his mouth goes crooked, his brow half drawn together.

Dick smiles to himself, and lies back down, this time his back turned to the room and attention on Lew.

"Hey."

Either Nixon maintains a surprising mental response time in his sleep, or he refuses to open his eyes long after waking, for that one softly spoken word invokes a quick and irritated snap. "Okay, Dick, got a headache. Either get up or be quiet."

"You're going to have a headache until you get up and get something to drink," he answers, not bothering to lower his voice. "You're dehydrated."

"And annoyed. You forgot that."

He reaches up, claps his shoulder, and yanks the blanket completely over Nixon's head. "Then sleep. Good night."

The shudder that runs through Lew at that brief contact is not lost on Dick—just an endearing if curious reaction. He claws the covers wildly and bundles them under his arms, freeing himself to stare unhappily at his bed mate, growing more irritated when Dick's mouth twitches in laughter instead. "I'll pluck those freckles off you one by one if you don't let me sleep," he threatens, focusing on the contrast of his blue eyes with the coppery red of his hair if only to keep from ogling where his neck became shoulder and how comfortable it seemed—maybe it would be better than goose feathers poking him through the pillow. "I mean it."

The corner of Dick's mouth, still turning steadily upward, serves to infuriate and pacify Nixon all at once. "You must."

He shoves Dick's shoulder, hoping that he might be strong enough to push him out of the bed. Unfortunately, it isn't, and he has to rise, biting back a grimace at the dizzy pain of doing so, and put his weight into it. Here they begin to tangle into each other in the attempt to push on to the floor. They will take another ten minutes—bantering in between, like boxers retiring to their corners between bouts—before Dick finally lets Nixon shove him off the bed, and heads downstairs, admitting a graceful defeat.

He rolls over and bunches the blankets around himself in victory, and that's when Dick takes notices of a fresh lump of blue and black along his neck, only peering out from beneath his shirt hem as far as Nixon will venture from the covers himself.

\---

"Winters!"

Outwardly, Dick greets the approaching shapes of Colin and Michael with a distant smile as he reacclimatizes to reality from the warm color of his memories. He interrupts the thought of when Nixon grinned victoriously, a spoon fisted cartoonishly in one hand as he poured him his cereal that morning, and gets to his feet. Even as they smile at his reaction—believing it to be an equally warm greeting, having known each other informally all their lives—Dick is mentally weighing them.

"Hey." The word is innocent enough, but his tone doesn't welcome them.

Colin, the first to call out to, glances warily over at Michael and they have a brief consul before deciding neither understands the strange, tense bark of his voice. They definitely don't understand how it could have come from Dick Winters, a boy has more freckles on his nose than unfriendly intentions in his body and always has. "Come to fish with us?"

He only mutely shakes his head and holds up the tackle box the two older teens had left in the grass, for convenience's sake, the day before. Both maintain for a moment a dim, confused smile of politeness, looking rather dumb aside one another. It's when he throws it into the water with a flick of his wrist that they yell with shock, Michael clutching at Colin's elbow in surprise. Rage quickly springs onto his face, contorted by a confusion that quickly ducks into the backseat, forgotten for a moment. Colin only squints, curling up his face and looking back and forth from Dick's eerily calm face and the disappearing tackle box.

"What the hell? Winters!" Michael snaps at him. "What the hell is wrong with you? That's mine!"

"Don't touch Lewis Nixon again," he says. The tackle box sputters a little, and then it's gone beneath the water, only a few errant bubbles to eulogize it. "Your fun's over."

"What do you care?" Michael says.

Dick can tell he's reining in his true thoughts—he can see the temptation to insult him, ridicule him for defending Nix battling the long-standing goodwill between them in his reddening neck, tightened brow, crooked mouth.

"I'll know if you try and attack him again."

I won't let him out of my sight, is the unspoken reason, but Dick falls purposely silent and stares Michael in the eye.

There's one last troubled lump swallowed before the temptation to anger wins, and goodwill is forgotten. He stomps out on to the pier, leaving Colin there, still blinking dully, arms tightened at his sides. Dick's mouth twitches slightly—Nixon got much less consideration before anger won out over politeness—and he attempts to school himself to appear ready to fight as Michael storms towards him, finger jabbing at him

"Goddamn it, Winters, I'll knock him back to New Jersey if I damn well please, calling me a dumb hick—"

He swears again when he stomps on the weakened board and plummets through it, dunking his leg in the water and slamming into the wood so hard he'll sport blue and black and green up his torso and arms for weeks. He clings to the next board to keep from falling in completely, face violently red, mouth open, half-swearing, and Dick stomps on it, dislodging it.

He falls into the water and comes up again, sputtering and dumbfounded. Dick looks down into the hole he's punched through the dock, and calmly steps over it.

Colin doesn't hide the half-amused expression on his face when Dick comes to the foot of the dock to stop in front of him. But when he stares at him for a moment, he raises his hands. "I only did it the one time. Haven't seen him since," he explains. "Michael caught him out on the road a couple nights ago." They both glance over at Michael, who is clamoring on to the dock, wincing replacing swearing as he pulls himself, sopping wet, from the water. He looks rather like a drowned cat, and beneath his heavy clothes and wet hair he looks to Dick with a mixture of pain, caution, and fear.

"It applies to you, too," Dick warns Colin almost conversationally. He even claps him on the shoulder before walking past him and up the path, heading back home and hoping Nixon will be lingering there anyway.


	7. Independence Day

Somewhere in his mind Nixon had convinced himself he'd steer clear of Dick Winters for a day or two—he'd busy himself with something else, spend some time to his lonesome. But, after a morning's vigil at his window spent staring at the barn, imagining red hair, and clutching an old, ignored novel in one hand, he knows it's a stupid idea. A whole month, and he's still unable to enjoy the countryside on his own. For one—his mother's carefully tended criticisms and complaints keep him occupied cleaning or running errands as she and his aunt lounge and laugh together. The time he escapes with Dick—as welcome to his sight standing at the door as blankets on cold nights—is thank-_god_-freedom. And two—the time spent away from him seems more and more like waiting. And he hates waiting.

So, he strolls down to the barn, novel in hand, and sits just outside the barn door, basking in the sun and reading to the faint sounds of hooves and brushes skimming on horseflesh.

"The Germans took Sevastopol."

Dick claps the dust his hands off as he strolls outside. He blinks evenly and stops to stand beside Nixon, lips pressing together thoughtfully, gaze shifting across the yard as he carefully considers the announcement. "Really." It's more of a placeholder than a question, something that doesn't go unnoticed.

Nixon nods absently as he puts his thumb into his book to keep his place. He squints up at Dick for a moment, before joining him in the distant gazing across the yard, as if they themselves were expecting some enemy force to burst in on the calm. "Two days ago. End of an eight month siege."

"Well, congratulations to them," Dick mutters.

Nixon laughs out loud at that, and turns that crooked grin up towards the lanky redhead, head encircled by burning white sun like a corona of divinity. "Never took you for a Axis Powers kind of guy," he jokes, putting his elbows on his knees.

The shake of Dick's head with a barely muffled snort of laughter in return makes Nixon's world flash bright and dark; his shadow dodges back and forth across his face as he moves. For some reason, the idea that so much in his life hinges on Dick Winters—where he reads his novels, for one—doesn't bother him as much as it logically should. The shadow settles solidly over his face, relieving him of the sun's glare and putting Dick's long, freckled face in view.

"You follow the war, then?" The muted tone of voice still hasn't left.

" 'Follow the war?' Dick, it's world war. Don't act like it's a weird thing to want to know." The corner of his mouth jerks nervously to the side. Not because of how goddamned _blue_ his eyes look, even shadowed by the harsh angle of midday sunlight now burning in his polished copper hair. Because he's staring back. The faint traces of green bruise on his face burn nervously as well.

"It's not," he says, then sits down beside Nix, arms resting on his knees, peering across the yard. "I just hate it."

"What, that I follow the war?"

He sighs. The dusty red of his eyelashes flash against the sunlight as he moves, glancing up to the sky for a moment, eyes turning to nothing but powder blue, pupils shrinking to near nothings. "Yeah."

"Really?"

Dick casts him a sidelong glance. "I thought sarcasm was your forte."

"It is," Nix says, as if were a perfectly obvious but completely unrelated fact. He hesitates. "Oh," he says, arching a brow and smirking, "was that what you were doing?"

The Lancaster native smiles briefly at him, lips moving against the ridge of his shoulder before he turns away. He expels a breath gently through his nose, his entire frame shifting as he releases tension from his shoulders and neck, settling neatly into his position beside his friend. His neck is flushing pink from heat, and his thin mouth presses together, fighting a much wider grin. "No," he lies playfully, and Nixon thumbs roughly along the spine of his book, forgetting completely that he's lost his place. Not that it matters, anyway. Reading is just a new way to wait.

"War's a terrible thing, Nix. I just don't want anything to do with it, if I can."

"Well, I doubt you'll fight this one. Not that they're doing well over there, but they don't make uniforms in skeleton sizes, Dick."

Dick snorts, smirking off to the side.

"Well, no worries for you either, then. Soldiers have to fight back."

He laughs in return, and it catches.

Nixon considers him quietly for a minute. He can't help but shiver around his choice of words in his thoughts—a little mental wince, wondering what's gotten into him—but he thinks Dick's beautiful in that moment, head bowing slightly, his edges glowing in sunlight, thick with the sweet smell of hay and it's musty cousin sweat and heat, lips curled back, eyes lowered. There's no real other way to express it, but he doesn't dare say it. Maybe nothing really frightens Dick Winters, but Nix's terrified to spend the summer alone, hooked to his mother's leash and sweating in futility and boredom. He won't risk scaring him off by telling him sometimes the urge to touch him makes him grab a book and rub his fingers red on the spine.

"Not even if it's to celebrate a victory in one long past?" Nix prompts him, thumbing the edge of the book cover. "We've got a shit-load of fireworks for tonight. Enough for you, too."

"I could see them just as well from my house…" Dick gives one last attempt at maintaining a semblance of wanted independence—something they've both been trying to preserve before it dissolves completely between them—and lets it happen. He nods his head, smilingly distantly. "Never mind. We'll be there."

That night, when Dick's face is turned up to the bleeding, electrical heavens, reflecting the skinned-knee reds, sun-intense yellows, and eerie blues and greens of the fireworks, he can't look away from the colors crossing his face. He watches until the sparkler stick hisses out on his fingers, harmlessly scorching them, and quickly ducks when Dick looks his way, cursing under his breath for more than one reason. That night, Nixon, at his mother's 'request', wears a thin white shirt that's still too thick in the humidity and clouds of smoke produced by the fireworks. And—as if at some vengeful devil's request—Dick wears black. He's so slim and strangely bright in that color, washed by the iridescent night sky, Nixon thinks he's done something terrible and wonderful all at once to deserve it.

Nixon's mother, aunt, and Dick's mother and father sit further down the hill—smiling gently, politely, shaking hands with the New Jersey elite with as much intimidation as Dick had Nix the day they met. Through the growing friendship of their boys, they've come to know each other in passing acquaintance, but this is the first night they've actually socialized together, and Nixon prays, standing with Dick on the apex of the hill, that it all goes well.

"Lew?"

"Yeah?" Nix murmurs, still watching the shapes of their parents, the tells of emotion obscured by the dark.

"_Care_ful—" he warns, reaching out towards him, as another sparkler fizzles out and bites Nixon's fingertips where he clutches it, half-forgotten and spilling white and gold sparks onto the grass.

"Shit," Nix mutters, dropping it and sticking his finger in his mouth. "Dmnmn it…"

Dick shakes with a quiet laugh, his hand looped around Nixon's opposite wrist, where he'd latched on in concern the moment before and neglected to remove said concern. Another musty _crack!_, bursting with smoke and whining as the firework shoots up into the air, and Nixon almost misses it.

"Good thing you only follow wars. You wouldn't last long," Dick mutters, and his eyes look into Nix's, but they're miles away for a moment. The calloused pad of this thumb brushes along the gentle ridges where Nixon's veins da-dum in his wrist for a moment—and boy, is it one hell of a moment.

"Yeah," he agrees, pulling his finger form his mouth.

Then, the contact breaks and Dick's gazing off again. The firework bursts overhead and wilts like an orange flower. Wilts, kind of like Nixon's independence. He has to feel that again—concern, laughter, something _colorbright_ in the texture of Dick's skin—but he doesn't dare reach out and risk anything.


	8. Not So Goddamned Nice

In everything Dick Winters is graceful, measured, precise and beautiful in a way that would make the old Renaissance masters run to their easels. Sometimes, it's all he can do not to crack some joke and ask what royal throne in what far off country he abandoned to live a rural existence in secret, preened to bear the crown but preferring instead to shoe horses and mend barns. He wouldn't know how to react if he were right. But for all his poised, years-beyond-years wisdom, Nixon can't resist the moments he's just himself—seventeen and still thirteen-year-old gangly—especially when he's telling some story and eating at the same time.

A grape disappears into his mouth, dies with a muted _squish_ as his smack lips close. "I accidentally shot my father the first time I went hunting," he says, eagerly plucking another from the bunch and smirking over at Nixon. "He and I got separated—I split right in the dark, and he split left. Neither of us noticed, we were so anxious to bring something home."

Nixon takes the liberty to interrupt here, reaching over to acquisition a grape and grin mere inches from Dick's face. "Wild stuff, Dick. Lemme guess—mistook him for the deer, and popped him instead?" His reward is a knife-quick glance of blue-green and a fierce flash of teeth that is the perfect blend of teenage wickedness and ageless kindness as they sit, bumping shoulders and sharing food.

"No—I thought he was a stranger poaching on our land, so I blasted him in the shin. Limped for weeks."

Nixon laughs at that, a grape pressed on his lip and on the brink of its death.

Summer at its height has driven them to water, and at the edge of the stream they sit, boots cast aside in an indiscriminate pile—half the fun will be picking theirs from the pile, pushing each other in an attempt to get dressed first and take off running. Feet in the water, framed by long grass, they squint against the sunlight reflected on the water and waste the afternoon with exchanges of stories. Neither has ever had to include so much back-story—describing characters and situations that seem like plain, common sense—because they've never had to. Stories circulate quickly and frequently in small towns, and any Nixon name lit up the city gossip switchboards instantly. Both were local figures, one for sheer population density and one for prestige.

"Yeah, you're one mean sonuvabitch," Nixon drawls. "I'm shaking."

Dick considers him from the side, amused. It's better that he doesn't know what he's done in his defense—just not to worry him, not to add more burden to a brow already wounded and lined enough. Nix wouldn't accuse him of being soft with that half-affectionate, half-serious smirk if he did. Dick considers proving him wrong for a moment as well, squinting beneath the sun and thumbing the cold skin of the grapes in his hands, but only smiles and looks at the water.

"You might be surprised."

"Hell, I'd be stunned," Nix jabs back, reaching out for a grape. Dick quietly cranes his neck to watch his selection process, the bundle sitting on his knees. "But I'm not worried. After all, the skies not full of pigs in flight, and last I checked, you'd be in no danger of freezing your tongue to a pole in hell."

"I'm not that nice," Dick says.

Lew takes this into consideration; he lets Dick know, by humming quietly and tilting his head to squint upward. Then, "Yeah, you are. You wouldn't hurt a fly for fear it might start to cry."

He snorts, as the sun passes beneath a rare cloud.

Dick's drawn mouth presses absently together, and he ventures an unapologetic sweep of Lew's face—its charcoal dark lines against his summer-washed skin, eyes more black than brown, childishly curved cheeks that offset his half-devil's smirk. He's concentrated, one brow cocked and the other hanging casually low, as he pinches a few grapes before plucking one that seems rise to his standards. There's something he wants to say, running in the same affectionate ribbing vein, telling him that one grape is like the other and he doesn't have to _shop_ for them, but all thought stops when Lew lifts his head and they stare at each other.

And then it kicks back in, now shooting forward with so much force that the blue-green of the water and the yellow grass around them is hazy like it's passing by the window of a car. He considers all things at once—the fact he can be rough, the bruise on Lew's neck, the landscapes of Nixon, New Jersey that he can only imagine, the feel of drunken breath on his face when they'd crawled in to bed, how many times he has to stop and look at him when they are on opposite sides of a room, just to know he's still there—but above else, he wants to prove himself to this smart-mouthed, half-surly kid.

The tunneling effect worsens as it draws on, neither making a move. Lew barely blinks, unmoving from where they'd frozen, dosed by the summer light. Dark, dark eyes are now diluted by the sunlight, and there's enough polished brown to drown in. The grape sits forgotten in his fingertips.

He has to show him somehow that he's not so goddamned nice—_not without sin_, as Lew once accused him of being, sometime in this month and five days that he's known him—without hurting him.

So he leans forward, basking in the startled expression on his face, and places his mouth on top of Lew's in a quick, skittish imitation of a kiss. He intends a sort of skewed cruelty, a physical sarcasm that has the added benefit of silencing him as well as disproving his own spotless nature. What he gets is not that.

The heat of his friend's mouth is like putting his lips to the stove top as it cools, not scalding, but too much to bear for more than a brief, red, jolting moment. The pain intended for Lew instead laps back on him, circling through the startled twitch of his lips under Dick's—tasting of the sun and milk from lunch—and back into him. Messengers run out to every extremity of his body, spreading the strange pain-pleasure to his toes and tips of his hair through a thunder of blood pumping in his ears. The tunneling, sweeping motion comes to an abrupt halt, and he's leaning back again with one astounded Nixon staring at him when it all settles.

His eyes are black again, and Dick would smirk, but his mouth, as shocked as he, holds dumbly open.

"What was that for?" Lew asks, and it's comforting to hear him speak as if they're only playing some card game, and Dick had folded a perfectly good hand.

Dick mutters to himself, eyes falling to watch the colors of Lew's mouth, all bright and pale against his dark features, "I wanted to hurt you."

They stare blindly at each other—Dick, to Lew's mouth; Lew, to Dick's lowered eyelids—for more than a minute before Dick realizes he has his hand gripped around a fistful of Lew's sleeve, which is hot from the sun and smells of sweat. They are not parting, nor noticing that all the grapes have tumbled to the grass between them. Dick—body still singing with blood and pain—flickers his eyes up to Lew's, and that pain becomes something like a fist, pulling at him from the sorest, softest part of his belly.

"You _are_ a mean son of a bitch," Lew mumbles absently, staring at him.

Dick tries it again. This time, the startled, deer-like quality of his motion is gone, and intent on pain forgotten. He tilts his head and pushes closer to Lew, pressing his lips more confidently around Nix's bottom lip, who sucks in a sharp, surprised breath that comes out more stuttering and blushing than he thinks is fair.

_Of course_, Nix thinks in a half-sullen pang, _he could never be goddamn nervous about anything._

What's more cruel, to him, is the fact that Dick stops abruptly—obviously wound and his mouth and skin as red and tempting as his freckles—and mutters a half-beat of apology before getting to his feet.

"_Mean_ son of a bitch," Lew says again, and the nervous laughter that rolls out of Dick is almost enough to make them both forget what happened.


	9. When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain 1/2

He'd gone to sleep, dreamt, woken, and dressed successfully—not for a minute letting worrying thoughts come his way through the remembered taste of watery fruit, wet feet, and a warm mouth. It's at breakfast that things began going wrong for Nixon, when he shuffles downstairs and settles down at the kitchen table. He rests his chin on his arms only to find himself staring at a bowl full of lime green grapes that glow in the mid-morning light. "Shit," he mutters, hoping to ignore the sudden thrill and sudden terror they evoke.

"Lewis, don't swear," his mother scolds him routinely. A hip to the door, and she's swinging into the kitchen, hoisting a large white pot onto the counter. "Do you think you could help me with this?" she asks him, more pointedly now, a flash of warning and guilt transmitted through it. "Unless you have something else to do?"

What Nix means by sighing and begrudgingly agreeing is part resentment and resignation, and part avoidance. When he pulls himself from the table to stand at the counter, awaiting orders as dutifully as any soldier, he's really forgetting all about the Pennsylvanian boy just outside that is (_leaning forward, intending to hurt_) scrubbing the algae from the water trough. He rolls his sleeves away from his arms, only to get them smacked unhappily.

"Wash them first," his mother tells him, pointing at a lump of waxy white butcher paper on the counter. She turns toward the oven and begins touching the dials. "You can tenderize the meat for tonight."

Nix sticks his tongue out at the wall and makes a horrific face where she can't see to make himself feel better. And, after washing his hands the minimal amount he can get away with, unwrinkles the butcher paper to reveal six, vivid red cuts, their faded white trim of fat greasy beneath his touch. And touch them he does, counting them silently. "What, Aunt Mabel's off her diet?" Nixon mutters to himself, flipping them over to occupy his hands.

His mother, now moving busily around him and plucking spices from the cupboards, sighs impatiently. "Don't make fun of her," she says first, and looks sharply at him. It's not the first time he's leveled something at her, and Mabel, being either too kind or inattentive, hadn't responded to it. "Don't you remember? We're having the Winters family over for dinner tonight, Lewis. I know I told you this."

He stops moving for a moment, a cold slab of beef squeezed between his fingers, and it's the juice of the grape he accidentally squeezed when Dick—"Oh, yeah," he says quietly, cutting himself off and rubbing his fingers somewhat clean on the white paper. She had told him, but three days before—before it would have been a big deal—and he'd forgotten.

He swears silently again.

He's going to have to face Dick again—and every stomach sick and blurry-headed feeling that now accompanies him like an unshakeable little brother—and do so in a stuffy starched shirt, no less.

\---

Dick absently scoops up a handful of grain from the bucket before the blood bay mare has a chance to nuzzle through it, and cups his palm towards her. Her big brown eyes, a dark, liquid color in the relative dim of the barn, consider him briefly before she reaches for it. Her lips are as dark as her eyes, and the long, curled lashes of her eyes echo the delicate velvet of her nose. He stands there for a moment, pressed against the stable door, arm snaked in between the bars to connect with her. Her teeth scrape the flesh of his thumb gently as her lips and tongue rummage the creases of his palm for the last few bits of grain.

When she finishes, he shakes whatever's left from his hand and she smacks her lips and snorts appreciatively. He returns the sentiment with a warm pat on the neck, and then pulls his arm out. She watches him for a moment, preferring the affection of being fed to rummaging in a loose, noisy bucket, but eventually loses interest.

Dick stands in front of her stall and cups the back of his neck, rolling his head back with a sigh. The smell of his own sweat rises to his nose, and he closes his eyes against an onslaught of memories that only worsen his nerves, filled with Lewis and the summer heat. The sunlight silhouettes his tall, gangly frame against the open barn doors, and he turns his head quietly towards them, gazing off into nothing.

While Nix has been dedicatedly barring the incident in his mind, diligently soldiering on, Dick cannot stop thinking about it. Evaluating, analyzing, and dreading. Wondering if, in retrospect, that burnished brown had been a sign of repugnance, his stillness horror, and the shudder beneath him a rising urge of disgust. He kneads the back of his neck and stares off, his hands rough from scrubbing the water trough and skin tender from the sun.

It seems he had actually succeeded in his original intention with that kiss, for there is no half-drowsy figure on the hay bale that morning, and no one in a lazy pile on the porch steps. Only a tension that touches him all the way out here.

He rolls down his sleeves and walks back home for the time being.

\---

"You look fine," chimes his mother's voice in tones of exasperation and playfulness when she passes the open doorway and again notices him worrying at his collar and touching the last signs of bruises she believed were from falling clumsily from a tree. When he startles and cranes his neck at her, she reaches out toward him, half-grimacing. "And don't fuss over it. You'll make it worse, not better."

He takes the time to properly roll his eyes while flattens both his collar and inspects his hair for flyaways, momentarily focused on the state of his shirt rather than the state of his surly face.

"You need a haircut," she tells him when she straightens and gives him a once-over. It's one of those harsh and overused a phrase that instead feels scolding and disapproving. Nix simply blinks through the pang of pain and aggravation that follows, swallowing it like a sour gulp of milk, and touches the side of his head as he nods, even though he doesn't agree. Anything to get her to walk out of the room.

Faint aromas and spices haunt the hallways, only growing stronger as Nixon trails his mother downstairs. The _tink_ of china and silverware echoes out of the dining room, and is quickly followed by the clip-clop of her heels on the floor as she quickly ducks back into the kitchen. His mother steps primly down the steps, wearing her favorite black dress. The phonograph is droning dimly in the air. And, as if on cue, the light that glows through the obscured glass on the door dims as three figures appear. The knock on the door goes straight through Nix, and he instinctively halts halfway down the stairs, white-knuckling the railing.

"Oh, they're here," she says, immediately flashing her best smile. Momentarily, she stops to reassess her son's appearance, and flaps her hand at him. "Lewis, don't just stand there!" she scolds, and hurries calmly to the door.

Somewhere, Kate Smith is singing through the phonograph's needle, and her swany voice wafts up, crooning through the static. "When the Moon Comes over the Mountain" is playing, and all Nixon can hear is her lonely and pretty voice crying, "_Every beam brings a dream, dear, of you_," when Dick steps inside, a gracious half-beat behind his parents, and his green-blue_blue_ eyes immediately find his. The color of his hair that always draws him like a moth to a deadly flame now makes him nervously wet his lips. Pumpkin-colored lashes blink up at him while the parents exchange greetings and coats are shed and hung.

It should be a crime that the thin, lanky lines of this Pennsylvanian _boy_ in a black shirt and khaki pants should thrill him more than a yellow dress riding up some pin-up's velvety legs. It should also be a crime that Dick is smiling faintly up at him, somehow amused. It's just cruel and unusual.

Dick's mother smiles warmly up at him, and Nix—in desperation, hoping it's only the copper red hair and not the redheaded boy that gets him so damn riled up—checks her out. The gentle slope of her face, the half-curl of her hair, the pale peach of her skin, the freckles of youth a faint memory. Small, but still curved where it mattered. Soft, feminine, delicate.

It doesn't help one bit.

"Hello, Lewis," she greets him, hair pulled back into a bun and blue eyes quiet but proud. "Nice to see you again."

"You too, Mrs. Winters," he answers, and tries not to be nervous when he teeters down the stairs. The only greeting he receives from Dick's father is a respectful nod and hello, which he returns absently. Nixon's mother then graciously bids them into the dining room with a debutante air that betrays her legacy as a self-aggrandizing rich woman from New Jersey and makes Nixon want to kick the bucket there and then, if it meant severing any relation to her. He can hear the higher, less refrained tones of his aunt's voice as more greetings are exchanged, and conversation started.

Dick lingers in the foyer, and Nix stares dedicatedly after their parents, still standing on the last step, unwilling to set foot any nearer to him.

"Aren't you hungry?" Dick asks in amusement, after a long silence.

Kate Smith sings again, her voice drifting higher, left with only memories of her love, and Nix mutters to himself, "Never goddamn nervous." He walks past Dick and into the dining room.


	10. When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain 2/2

It's neither his mother nor his friend's fault that they are seated directly across from one another at the dinner table. Dick can't be expected to premonition the seating chart before he kisses someone—making the following dinner excruciatingly tense—and his mother can't be expected to know what happened between two teenage boys over a bunch of grapes on the riverbank. He wishes it were that simple. Every anxious lurch of his stomach, every lungful of air that's never enough, and every acute stab of chest pain that ails him could be someone else's fault.

They eat, the parents talk, the sons nod appreciatively at just the right moments. Nix barely acknowledges Dick is there; Dick watches him dedicatedly out of the corner of his eye, almost protectively. Too busy juggling the duties of hostess and the duties of haughty elite, Nixon's mother barely notices Lewis' strange silence. Mabel has never given her "nephew" of sorts much attention, and his skinny, horsy-looking friend merits even less. They chalk his silence up to polite embarrassment, especially when the topic turns to the friendship their boys have struck up so quickly and so readily.

"Those two are as thick as thieves," Mrs. Nixon says, and she grins over at them, parents grouped at one end of the table and the boys at the other. "Lewis barely knows what to do with himself when Dick's not here to keep him occupied."

They laugh together in an almost conspiring way, and Nixon feels another ounce of patience shrivel away.

Shoulders still hunched to his mother's disapproval, shuffles the vegetables weakly around his plate. Dick smiles privately at him, rubbing his utensil absently between his fingers while he studies the sullen scowl he's making. Nix spears a gangly green bean when the parents' attention shifts away, but Dick's stare lingers. With no small amount of annoyance, he jams the vegetable into his mouth and chews it viciously. Would he _stop_ that already?

Between the itchy, uncomfortable starched shirt his mother forced him into, and the uncomfortable situation Dick is forcing him into, he'd have to be blind not to see how aggravated Nixon is already—_without being stared at_. Before the topic shifts back to them again, as the proud twinkle in his mother's eye suggests it eventually will, he shoots Dick a warning glance.

_Stop looking at me like that_, it says.

He ignores the gentle smile Dick flashes him in return, hardly heeding it at all, and spears another horribly cooked bean into his mouth. He even begins to arch his brow apologetically—and, other than the clenching lurch in his stomach, he's completely immune to it. No, not a moment of sunlight goes through him to see the corner of his mouth, the one not visible to the others, curl up only because he's looking at _him_. Not at all. He doesn't taste the watery flesh of grapes in a dry mouthful of potatoes and he most definitely doesn't _want_ to.

Luckily, Dick doesn't seem brave enough to speak, either, and they spend the rest of the dinner listening to their parents talk and Mabel giggle along.

Nixon stands and begins gathering up plates before his mother can remember to snap at him to do so—saving him both the embarrassment and from the scrutiny of the redheaded boy across the table. He smiles politely and rises from the table, reaching first for his mother at his right side. "Why, thank you, Lewis," she says, and smiles over at Dick's parents. They take the hint, and gratefully and humbly offer their own cleaned plates.

When he finally completes the rounds and reaches for Dick's plate—one step away from sliding into the kitchen and getting away—he stands up, plate in hand. "I can take it," he says quickly. _He_ purposely _waited until I was as goddamned close as I was going to get_, he thinks, when there's only a fraction of space to separate them. _I really should have believed him._

"I got it. It's only fair," Nixon interrupts, using the angle of his body to his advantage, hiding the fact he all but wrenches the plate out of his friend's hand.

He then disappears through the kitchen door with all the resigned resentment and haste of a misused servant, letting the door give Dick the final word on the unspoken topic when it clicks shut again. And, for a moment, the Pennsylvanian boy accepts it, not knowing how to change it, and turns instead to stare at the spaces Nixon has vacated—the plate he's snatched away, and the emptied seat opposite him.

Dick patiently waits for the door to swing back open again. In the meanwhile, he feigns a pointed interest in the adults' topic of discussion—something related to Mr. Nixon and the service—with one ear tuned to the door behind him. Plates clink-clatter into the dry sink, feet shuffle around the tiles, and he can even hear Lew issue a windy, annoyed sigh from the kitchen. He smiles.

It takes a few more minutes to realize—after fully forcing all hazy, distracting thoughts from his mind—that there's been an odd silence from the kitchen opposite the lively conversation Nixon's mother and aunt are attempting to have. Dick, still feigning interest, watches the soft, earthy look in his own mother's eyes hide a more bored, half-put off expression, and feels that silence weigh heavy on him. Logic says it shouldn't take this long to simply bus dishes. Instinct says it doesn't.

"Excuse me," Dick says quietly, so that only his parents seem to catch it. His father, barely acknowledges it. It takes all his concentration to hide whatever feeling he really has towards their hostesses, dislike or begrudging acceptance, and he simply tucks his chin in a half-nod.

His mother is the one that briefly smiles back at him and answers with, "Of course." An equally brief flash of a smile is returned, as he unfolds his long limbs from the chair, and tries to unobtrusively dart into the kitchen before Lewis disappears off to some favorite and obscure spot to sulk. Which is exactly what he's in the process of doing when he steps inside.

Nix is a flash of movement across the room that freezes immediately when the door opens, looking so like a amateur thief caught in the act that Dick has to laugh. He's halfway through the door on the opposite side of the kitchen, eyes wide, body visibly magnetized towards the darkened stairwell beyond. The island, cluttered with dishes and utensils thick with food, stands as a useless line of battle drawn between.

"What are you doing?" Dick asks, while the laugh still colors his voice.

Nix grimaces. Dick will _not_ overtake him again, even though his hair glows beneath the lights as richly as a newly minted penny and the way he looks at him is both terrifying—like a wolf spotting a limp in a healthy herd—and hideously cute. And he'd tell him that too, if he could find where he'd left his nerve.

Unfortunately, he doesn't remember, and instead chooses to avoid the whole painful ordeal of staring at that Pennsylvanian boy and feel his control turn tail and abandon him by—without one word—going through that doorway and fleeing upstairs. He treads lightly so that Dick won't hear him run, and he runs so that Dick won't catch him.

"Lew?"

The undeterred voice follows him cautiously into the hallway, but he's already nearing the top step and gaining speed. The darkened doorway to his bedroom is only a few motivated steps away, but—tasting the watery flesh of grapes again, memory creeping up and slowing him—he hesitates long enough for Dick's long legs to close the gap. And, when he finally makes it up the stairs, the memory relents to the sharp reality of how ridiculous he feels, running from the only thing in the entire damn state that he can stand.

It's going to be a long vacation if he cuts Dick out of the picture.

But he doesn't want to forfeit so quickly, nor appear desperate, so he sighs dramatically and juts his jaw unhappily as he turns around. "_What?_"

And here that control—first lost to a violent Lancaster welcoming committee, borne in a physical map of bruises, restored by the warm colors and words of a strange farm boy, and then again robbed away with an awkward kiss tasting of sweat, water, and milk—decides to leave him again, standing in a darkened hallway with Dick Winters. The colors of his eyes and face momentarily overwhelm him, and he causally white-knuckles the banister. He's dusted blue and gray thanks to the window behind him, his face glowing from the residual golden light from downstairs. There's something so unfair about the whole thing, he can't help but let out a little wordless complaint of a whine.

Dick smiles at the sound, and the wolfish quality is gone. Instead, a more sincerely gentle smile returns—a familiar lift of one corner of his mouth to balance his thoughtful look. He mirror's Nix's action and grips the wooden banister, moving forward until they stand only two strides apart.

"I'm sorry for what I did," he apologizes in a low voice, foolishly afraid someone might hear them over Mabel's boisterous Prohibition stories. But he cuts quickly to the bone of their tension, never one to waste time. "I never meant to hurt you."

"Sure," Nix mutters, scrunching his nose unhappily to hide the fact he's death-gripping the banister. He constantly takes a measurement of the space between their hands, watching it more intensely than the French did the Maginot Line. Dick's no invading German corps, but he watches nonetheless.

Dick tilts his head at Nixon's lack of response. Then, pressing his lips nervously together, moves his hand closer. That gets more response than anything.

"It was wrong of me to do." He tests the waters with a more apologetic tone, hoping it might get Nix to at least look at him. "I don't want it to hurt our friendship."

"Goddamnit, Dick, it's not," he says, studying the patterns in the mahogany with absolute dedication. "You're making a big deal out of nothing. Go back downstairs. I can't stand them anymore and I'm going to bed."

Dick's gentle mouth then quirks in an expression more often seen on his friend's face, having successfully sent his mother a nasty face behind her back with Dick as a secretly amused audience.

"No, it's not ruining anything. _You're_ trying to," he says, still as quiet as a horse's tail flicking.

Nixon pulls his troops away from the Maginot line, off the banister, and prepares a retreat to his dark room. "Flattery will get you no where in life," he says.

Dick smiles despite himself, his fingers twitching. "Lew."

"Tired of this. Going to bed now," he drawls, arching an eyebrow, insisting he's both finished talking and not amused with a half-assed glance. And for a moment, seeing no advance on the German side of the argument and no immediate movement in either Dick's body or expression, he believes he'll make it there.

Then: "I liked it."

That stops the retreat, though it's a nervous halt, an action of indecisiveness more than anything. The quiet, controlled nerves in Dick's voice—echoing that first, jittery laugh after the happening over the grapes—sits like a hook in the very bottom of his belly, truthfully probably somewhere lower, and every word yanks it through his body, choking and stimulating him all at once.

Nixon stares into the shadows of the dark hallway, trying not to betray any reaction in either his silence or stillness. The edges of this world are lined gold by distant lights, background thrumming with the sound of the phonograph needle downstairs spinning on nothing.

"I didn't mean to hurt you, but I meant what I did. I don't regret it."

"Of course you don't," Nixon mutters, and finally—_well, I guess he_ is _nervous occasionally_—turns to look at Dick.

He doesn't resist the invasion when Dick finally jumps across Alsace and Lorraine and does it again, hurrying him against the wall and out of sight, and kisses him. Now height plays its role, no longer conveniently remedied by sitting side by side, and Nixon feels his head pressed back against the wall, tilted up to best meet Dick's mouth, warring with a wordless diplomacy as they test out their new activity. There's a groan that rattles between them once when hands find each other and more parts touch, connect—neither knowing nor truly caring who made it. There's a ceasefire as Nixon breaks the connection, finding the air suddenly much colder than he remembered only a moment ago, and gulps down a nervous lungful of air. He's now counting Dick's freckles much closer than he'd ever though he could.

Dick hovers close, forehead eagerly touching his, asking permission to do it again, and his thin, smooth mouth curls back in a gentle smile. "Lew." He says it this time because he can.

"I haven't done this much," Nix says. He's unsure why Dick raises an eyebrow in amusement then—but then again, he's not sure why he can't catch a decent breath either.

Dick smirks. "Liar."

He kisses him again, and Nixon's a little afraid of how easily he falls back into the touch, lips reaching for his mouth. Nix breaks away and the kiss fractures into a simple, noisy _smooch_—which also strangely thrills him. His legs and torso have mutinied from each other, the upper pressed against the wall while the lower arches towards Dick's legs, pleasantly contorted. It's only the arm looped around his back that keeps him steady.

"No, with a…"

For the first time since he's known him, Nixon sees Dick's truly youthful and wonderful ability to for once, just _once_—no longer smiling politely beneath Mrs. Nixon's watch, dutifully sweeping and cleaning stalls, or diplomatically suffering Nixon's bouts of moodiness—act selfishly. And how _not_ bumbling and innocent he seems to be when it comes to making out in dark hallways.

He presses his mouth on the corner of Nix's and sucks at it, grinning. "Same rules," he says quietly, untangling his hands from Nixon's to thrush them through his hair before kissing him again. "You have to stop talking, for one."

It's only when Mabel's curious voice calls out from the kitchen—"Lewis?"—that they separate, laughing silently through their overly physical attempts to straighten each other up.

As they sneak back downstairs, Nixon smirks. "Glad we got that sorted out."


	11. Friendship and Something

"Need something?" The world is too bright to even consider opening his eyes, but he knows Dick is there by the faint sound of breathing and the tattoo of his feet on the floorboards. He does brave his out from underneath his pillow but keeps his eyes soundly shut against the assault of sunlight. "Or just can't wait downstairs?"

He hears an amused snort—nearer than farther away—but the telltale noise of objects being shifted on the desk gives away his position. He hears the faint smile in Dick's voice and imagines the fiery red of his hair in the white room. "You haven't even moved any of these things," he says, tilting a long empty cologne bottle so that it _clinks_ against the mirror. The vacated spot is three shades darker than the surrounding wood. "Or unpacked any of yours."

"Less shit to pack up again, then," Nix mutters into his pillow.

"After a month?"

The aggravation in his groan belies the relief he feels. "God, don't you ever _sleep_?"

Dick smirks to himself—Nixon hears his breath snort from his nose—and the floorboards creak as he shifts his feet and tugs open a drawer. Finding nothing interesting upon rifling through it, he shuts it again. The noise is thunderous, and he groans again. "You want to go to the lake?" Closer now.

Excluding the unholy amounts of light pouring into the room, Nixon considers it a rather comfortable place to be, still incubated by the heat he accumulated all night, the surrounding air not yet stifling, and the telltale sounds of Dick Winters filling the room. No reason to ruin that with useless activities like _waking_.

Another garbled noise is his answer and Nix burrows beneath his pillow again. The fierce sunlight is making the inside of his eyelids glow a vivid pink-orange, painting the world far too bright to sleep. The red in his imagination is enough.

"Come on, Nix. It's almost lunch, " Dick says, doing his best to tight-lip his smile as he stops beside the bed and looks down. Yellowed skin from his healing bruises still peeks out beneath his clothes, but, with a few more days' rest and sun, they'll be gone for good. Tufts of dark, bedraggled hair also peek out from underneath the pillow, and one leg juts out off the mattress.

"Not hungry," he mumbles, turning his head towards the wall underneath the pillow. Another, grumbling noise of protest escapes him when Dick claps him on the leg and then steals the pillow from him. It's an awfully parental thing of him to do, and Nixon reacts in much the same way—uttering some offensive words in a harmless slur and crawling beneath the covers—but his faint smile is hidden from sight.

"Well, you won't be disappointed to hear no one's here to cook for you, then."

There's a sinking feeling Nixon has when he smirks beneath the obscuring blanket, grinning almost dumbly into the murky and bright world it creates, and cannot bring himself to pretend he's unhappy Dick's there anymore. _Barely five mintues_. He scoffs at his own weakeness before pushing away independence and blankets and braving an eyeful of overenthusiastic sunlight.

The first things he notices are the heat-irritated splotches of red running down Dick's neck, a sure indication aside from the faint smell of green hay that he's been up early this morning in the stables. The patchwork pattern reminds Nixon of the quilts in the chest at the foot of his bed where he hides his smokes, where he'd pulled the extra blanket when Dick had stayed the night. Then a smile drags him back to a tactile present, summer warm skin resting on his exposed foot, five fingertips dangerously close to ticklish skin.

"Lake?" Nix mumbles, squinting up at him. He's lying on his back, dark hair clumped wildly, and mouth twisted oddly.

Dick hides his expression by ducking his head momentarily to gather his thoughts. "Technically not a lake, but still worth the trip." Nixon grunts, pillow returned and unceremoniously dropped on his face. He claws tiredly at it, limps as flimsy as rubber in the morning, while Dick taps his foot once more, then removes his hand. "Come on, Lew."

Floorobards creak wearily again—a sign of Dick's imminent movement in any direction that isn't closer—But Nixon moves quickly and catches him by the wrist. There's a moment of unspoken remembrance when they look at each other, and they both pretend there's no unbecoming eagerness in how easily Dick is pulled off his feet and clamors onto the bed. Nixon kicks away the blankets and makes room for Dick to crawl up, clothed and most welcome.

Nixon laughs and mutters, "Kind of tipsy this morning. Been in the liqour cabinent without me?" before he press his mouth against the hollow just below Dick's neck. Salt from sweat stings his tongue a little, but it feels nothing like the laughter that follows—rolling out, chest deep, with Nixon's ear pressed close like he's listening to a rumble of thunder on a humid night through the walls.

Dick takes the joke and moves on in that graceful way he always does. One arm props him upright on the mattress, freeing the other to ruffle Nixon's hair at the nape of his neck in a playful motion very seldom revealed. He closes his eyes as he tilts his head against Nix's, sitting with him. He ignores the uncomfortable heat the two of them create, only compounding the July air that thickens in anticipation of the dog days of August. One hums with the residual heat of the summer sun and the other from the warmth of a good, long sleep.

"They went into town to shop," Dick says as Nixon leans into him, attempting to get a little more shuteye, and Dick accomdates him. "Your mother informed me that she might not be home until late."

"No suprise there." He smells horse as he ventures his mouth along the line of collarbone just below his collar, and grins against it. The cool of his teeth makes Dick shiver, and nearly fall backwards. "The real surprise is that she went _into_ the barn to tell you, I assume?"

"No—she stood and yelled at the door, holding one foot off the ground to keep her shoes clean," Dick says, with such heartfelt humor that the both of them shake with laughter until they're splayed on top of one another, unable to stop but free to be taken by whatever they feel.

\---

The best thing about friendship and a little freedom in empty rooms with Dick Winters is that he is completely able to entertain himself and leave a dozing lump of Lewis Nixon happily alone on the pier for a nice afternoon snooze. Well, mostly—Nixon is periodically woken by a cold, wet pair of hands soaking through his shirt and a warm, wet mouth on his face, temple, and stomach. When he sits up, cursing through a smile, the offender is gone beneath the water like some goddamned mermaid.

Patience strangely settles in, though, and Nixon's able to ignore whatever offense as long as sun easily reverses all damages. Hearing a nearby splash, he tilts his head to squint out across the water. Dick glances back at him and smirks briefly before a wafe laps against his mouth, and he turns to swim out to deeper water.

Lew grimaces in the sun to avoid cracking some ridiculous smile in response and closes his eyes. Summer often meant finely primped social affairs set in the safety of shade trees and flirting with whatever socialite daughter most pleased his mother and thus made herself as omnipresent as possible for a few insufferable days. There was a powedered delicacy to them, a polished sheen in their appearance that fought their youth and denied any unbecoming filthiness that never allowed Nixon any true peace. Cutlured turns of phrase and connected stories made for interesting conversation at best and a beautifed waste of time mostly. He remembers affection for those girls and those summers that has waned steadily through the years.

A day at the lake with a skinny and quiet Pennsylvanian boy is far more relaxing than holding some girl's hand beneath a tree as she giggles and draws attention to her pale blue dress. In fact, his mind drifts away—painting images of Dick beneath the willow tree on his mother's favorite summer home in a pale blue shirt, chewing a mouthful of apple—when someone literally stomps in on them.

There's an ugly boot clawing at his face as weight settles against his head, pinning him to the pier. And, judging by the familiar amusement in the violent geasture, he can surmise who it is. But there's no additional descending kick to say hello, so he assumes he's come alone, and he tries to squint his eyes open against the sun. Only a silhouette greets him, and the sun prints a purple-blue spot on his vision like a cigarette burn.

He's just getting so _tired_ of this.

He knocks the foot easily enough off his face and grimaces as he rubs the dirt from his brow and lips. Strangely enough, he thinks of how Dick had accidentally jarred him as they kissed and walked—honestly trying to make it downstairs before the sun set—and he'd bitten the inside of his own mouth. Even with the prick of pain and metallic wash of blood, there'd been a tiny, corresponding burst of pleasure to combat it. There's little of that now.

"Didn't think you were dumb enough to come to a place like this alone."

Nix leans back on his arms, feeling more annoyed than threatened. " Me either. All my money must be ruining my memory." He rolls his eyes with relish. "I'll be sure to waste it all away on frivoulous shit as soon as possible and get back to you."

Michael seems less amused by it, and he stands tensed and anxiously on the edge of violence, like some hunting dog that's been tied too long and stretches his rope. He's a murky, looming figure in Nixon's vision, but he's hardly shaking any more. As of late, this violent shadow has been scarce, and Nixon has no intention of breaking that trend and refreshing any of his bruises.

"Get out of here now and I'll leave you alone," he offers. It's relatively civil compared to the amount of consideration he's given in previous encounters. But there's that same hungry and bored expression that means he'll probably knock him around no matter what. "This ain't a place for you."

Nixon stands up, knowing it's a sure-fire way to spark a fight. But his legs are cramped from sitting, and he'll damn well stand if he wants. "Sorry. Didn't realize this was _your_ muddy water hole. Next time I'll make reservations first, asshole," he deadpans, and rolls back his sleeves just in time to duck and feel a lashing punch hit him in the side of the head. Bony knuckles whip across his ear.

"Fucking shit!" he growls, then lunges back. The first punch misses, but he makes sure to follow up the empty swing with a countering, open-handed left hook that catches Michael with a satisfying _slap!_

Michael grimaces, half-mortified, struck with such a childish blow, then grabs Nixon by the shoulder, increasing violence in mind. Nixon jabs his elbow into whatever soft part come nearest—_his neck_—managing to buy just enough time to learn the second best part of friendship and something else with Dick Winters is having someone willing to fight on _your_ side.

Hesitation crosses Michael's face—and what an ugly close view Nixon has of it—before a flash of blank and base terror washes over him. Then Dick, sopping wet after climbing out of the water, lashes Michael so hard across the mouth his splits his skin on his teeth. Together they watch him stumble back and cup both hands around his wounded lip it's as if he were catching Christ's blood in it.

"I warned you," Dick says coldly, and Nixon looks at him.

A stubborn lack of response is his only reward, a sign he was completely unware Nixon wasn't alone. He sulks at being caught, and grimaces as he paws at his split lip. It's not until he's stomped off in meek retreat—Dick's green-blue eyes burning steadily at his back should he turnabout with any new attempt—that Nixon lets out a low whistle. Dick blinks and turns to look at him, eyes innocently wide.

"Goddamn. You _aren't_ nice."

Dick smiles briefly, sarcastically. "I'll keep that in mind," he says. "Let me see your head."

"I'm fine," Nix says, glancing at Dick's hand. "You might want to worry about yourself instead." But he relents when Dick presses the other hand on his shoulder and forces him to sit. He rolls his eyes, of course. Dick then tilts Nixon's head to better examine the damage done, a lump already swelling on the side of head.

The third perk to friendship and something that turns dark hallways to pleasant battlegrounds with Dick Winters is that he tends carefully to harmless lumps on others before his own bloodied hand. And he'll have no more about his own health until everyone else is taken care of. So, while one hand parts his hair, looking for signs of brusing or injury, Nixon pulls Dick's hurt hand into his lap and covers his bleeding knuckles until the he finishes and finds Nix healthy enough to tend to his own injury.


	12. Undercurrent

Nixon makes another bored go of the house before eventually finding himself upstairs in his room. He throws the quilt chest open and opens up one of many packs of smokes buried away there, as hastily as a winter-starved fox robs his earthbound stores. One is lit and smoke pouring out his mouth in a cottony cloud before he's even out of the house—but he'd be damned if there were ever an overbearing mother and obnoxious Chihuahua woman of an 'aunt' home anymore to catch him. Idyllic countryside and prim, pathetic excuses for horseback riding on pedigreed Thoroughbreds seem to entertain Doris Nixon less and less. Making a fool of herself, fruitlessly tugging on a cow's udder to mimic a farmhand, apparently only has so much amusement to offer. Smoking sullenly as he sits behind the barn, Lewis has to disagree.

She ventures out longer and longer furloughs, leaving him more and more often in the servants'—and Dick's—hands. "Just around," is all she'll really divulge—and return a day or two later bundled with shopping bags and loaded with gossip from Hershey to Allentown to Philadelphia. More and more, he has to find someplace else to be when his father calls to check in. Otherwise, the servants have no choice to turn it over to the "young master" when no one else is home. He swears on his life to turn fascist and tattoo swastikas across his face if he has to endure another political novel dictating over the phone.

More and more often, his alarm clock is a freckled mouth in a surprising spot and hands pulling him off the bed by both feet, not a distant, shrill cry of "_Lew-is!_" A blessing in most regards—_shit, pretty much every single one_—but definitely not in one way.

August hangs heavily in the air, the last, humid dragon breath of summer before colder weather returns to its old posts. The green products of May rains and June sun are crisping up—drying out, browning, and aging under summer's intensity. Worn down through its own fruitfulness. It's an ironic fact not lost on him this Sunday morning. He's a son of Nixon—he's smart enough to grasp the fine, tortuous implication of that thought, or at least he's expected to be so.

Dick's gone to church, as always, but he's late in coming back. Nixon's mother is thankfully out—she smiles in almost quaint condescension when Dick comes over, but always lets Lew run off with him—but even that fact makes him uneasy.

Not even the earthy burning, taste of tobacco really soothes him. Not even the smell of horses—the pleasant, dusty smell of their hair and skin that Dick often wears—helps him settle. He's anxiously puffed away half the pack before he has the good mind to remember Dick hates the smell and taste of them. Somehow even that half-beat of disapproval as he scrunches his nose eats at Nixon to see. He hides the rest of his pack away in the quilt chest before brushing his teeth and setting out for the Winters' place by himself.

\---

He's not even to the fence—their halfway-there rendezvous point—when he sees a familiar figure sitting on the top rail and an unfamiliar one standing in front of him, feet planted firmly and hands clenched around her waist.

"Goddamn. For a second, I thought you were the one in the dress, Dick."

Dick shoots him a look, the far corner of his mouth tugging back. "Sunday would be the day for it."

And it's so damn funny—much more humorous than waking up on his own, listless and restless and grimacing at a white ceiling—he laughs a good, hard laugh. The girl pins him a strange look, and then Nixon knows exactly who it is, without yet recognizing the pale, green-blue of her eyes or the familiar rise of her cheekbones under pale skin.

Dick obediently slips off the top rail to introduce her, and then they are standing beside each other, both thin and freckled with strangely tight-lipped smiles. Not that the girl is smiling so much as considering him with caution-laced curiosity, unsure of what to make of him just yet. "Nix, this is my younger sister Ann," he says. "Ann, this is Lewis Nixon."

"Nice to meet you," Nixon answers. He extends his hand toward her to shake—just because he knows it would boil his mother's blue blood to see, _shaking_ a young lady's hand—and partly because that caution then changes to quiet approval.

Her light, sandy hair glows in the sunlight, the smoothness of her pulled-tight ponytail slowly corrupted by flyaway threads of gold from the faint wind. She smiles that enigmatic flicker of a smile Dick's so often thrown his way. Only the few inches of separating height keeps them from looking eerily similar, side-by-side, wearing matching expressions.

"You too," she says, actually taking his offered hand. And—despite every incensed lesson in gentlemanly behavior his mother's given him after embarrassment—he does not shatter every fragile, feminine bone in hers when he shakes it in return. When they let go, she stands up a little straighter and claps her hands coyly behind her back. "So you're Dick's new best friend. You know, he's out with you so much it seems like I'm an only child now!"

There's a conference-glance between Dick and Lew—flushed modesty and unabashed satisfaction, respectively—before Lew gives her his most impeccable, toothy smile that, in the Nixon family, bears a capacity for both good and evil. "So I've heard. But I can't really help you there, since I don't intend to give him back anytime soon."

She giggles, and Dick shakes his head as if it could to anything to dislodge his barely restrained smile.

"I think I might have joined you and Dick for dinner if I had known you weren't actually as snobbish as people pegged you to be," Ann continues, fidgeting so that the hem of her light dress swing dances around her knees. "Not many families like yours come to a place like this, so everybody thought you'd be horribly stuck-up and steered clear. You seem nice enough, though."

"Oh, I'm really not," Nixon answers, grinning and not at all unaware of the effect it has on how the hem of her dress dances and just what that means. Especially while keeping the evidence of her brother in mind. "I'm just good at hiding it. Top of my class, in fact." The flirtatious spark that kindles in her returning smile prods him on. "I'm only as nice as your brother."

Another entranced spell of laughter follows from Ann, and Nixon glances over to Dick, still flashing all of his teeth.

In response he arches his brow a marginal little inch. Nixon's not sure if it's born of embarrassment or amusement. "Lew." _Don't tease her._

He very much wants to correct him on that—_Oh, I'm not teasing_ her, _Dick_—but Ann interrupts, turning to Dick and readopting her previous expression of half-petulant pleading, hands settled at her tiny waist.

"Can I please come with you? I don't have anything else to do. I don't want to go home and read or something," she pleads.

Nixon carefully watches Dick's expressions fight to surface as his baby sister makes her case as to why it's unfair, cruel, and "just like boys" to exclude her if she wants to go. Each (reluctance, affection, frustration) makes it no further than his tight crescent smile and the amused flicker of his nostrils as he snorts. Gentleness settles in, smoothing out the bitter medicine of denial, and a few minutes later they leave her unhappy silhouette hunched on the top rail for "no girls allowed" swimming, the hem of her dress fluttering listlessly around her knees.

Pristine white Sunday shirt traded for his usual pale brown, Dick rolls his sleeves up to his elbows as they walk in the August heat. In step beside, Nixon can't help but disagree again with his mother. There's nothing tiring in that well-worn smiling corner of his mouth, his earthly knowledge or his unchanging kindness on long, carefree afternoons. There's nothing boring in his hard-earned laughter or the indescribable, knife-edged undercurrent they sometimes find in the space after a joke, or so deep into a kiss beneath a pier or in a barn Nixon can't remember which hand is his, and which has never grasped a bottle of whiskey pilfered from his father's unwelcoming study. But then again—she's the one out, seeking a peaceful country experience and quickly losing interest. He's got peace, and he's got it with Dick Winters.

For once, the answer to a question is no more difficult and convoluted to get than just asking, and he's not eager to go back home and forsake it.

"Feeling blessed enough now?" Nixon asks, elbowing him good-naturedly as they brush each other, side by side. "How long do you think that state of grace will last before you go back for another three-hour refresher?"

The blue-green of his eyes is slightly paler than his sister's, whose seem to swing to the greener side of the fence. "I don't know. Maybe I wouldn't have to go back every week if I could keep from spoiling it so quickly."

Dick smiles at the ground, reaching to finish rolling up his other sleeve. There's already a faint shine of sweat on his hands and elbow that promises to get worse as the sun burns on. "You could spend time with your family, you know. You don't have to wait for me if it's that much trouble," he continues. There's a humor in it—_there's a snowball's chance in hell of that happening_—but Nixon knows he's also sorry it has to be that way.

"I've spent enough time with that woman. If I'd had my choice, I'd only have spent the required nine months with her, then been on my merry way as soon as she dropped me." He winces and shakes his head. "Goddamn."

Dick playfully knocks his elbow away with his own, and Lew, smirking, stuffs his hands into his pockets to keep from grabbing him. If he expressed everything he found so fucking perfect about him with more than a pointed look and a smile, they'd never make it anywhere in decent time.

"Ann really seemed to take a shine to you."

Lew makes a face at him. "Are you encouraging me or something?"

"No," Dick says. "Just pointing out the facts."

"Just point out the way to the water, Casanova." Nixon squints through the sun as the merciful clusters of clouds drift away and the boiling-hot light drops over them again. They walk awfully close, a thin, farm-toughened kid with hair like a vinegar-polished penny and a disenchanted boy from wealth with eyes darker than ink. Nixon can't always believe they are so close despite their all their deep and obvious differences and that any moment the light might shift and Dick will see him for the horrible things he is and probably will always be. Or one more kiss and he might finally tire of cigarettes and a taste of alcohol on the answering mouth.

"Besides, it must run in the family. There's nothing she can really do about it, the poor girl."

Dick makes a face in return. "Oh? Is it that prep school charm that drives everyone wild?"

"I don't know," Nixon says, grinning in a helpless bout of laughter. "You tell me." It's the most inebriated he's felt in a long time, even with Mabel's stores mysteriously disappearing lately.

"Well," the redhead says, the telltale whisper of laughter through his nose setting all the hair on Nixon's arms to attention, "it's something to do with your money."

Nixon snorts, surprised, and shakes his head. "You _sonuvabitch_," he half-growls, half-laughs.

He socks him in the arm and Dick laughs outright.

They make it to the grove beside the lake before heat and humidity is forgotten and thoughts of swimming forsaken, if only for a little while. The Lancaster native curls his fingers through Nixon's, grips tight, and stares quietly at him. There's a damnable curl to that mouth—that all-knowing smirk that by all logic should piss him off but never does. A few, humid moments pass in the shade and Nixon can't stand that _look_ any longer in silence.

"What?"

He's not sure why he sounds half strangled, and he's beginning to think he's on the edge of some fever dream, about to wake up alone, in a bed of mussed sheets in New York, the whole summer having been no more than deep and cruel hallucination.

Dick closes his eyes and smiles, leaning forward to rest his chin against Nixon's forehead. "Nix, _relax_."

He's groping with his other hand for its counterpart, and Nixon denies it, just to grab onto a fistful of his shirt to keep from loosing his nerve.

It's less like drowning than unwittingly setting foot in quicksand, this sensation Nixon's relatively sure is what he was meant to feel with those girls in blue dresses on summer estates. No immediate panic settles in—_as some voice always tells him it should, one which is never louder than anything Dick says_—and he steps freely closer—_kissing and grinning at the same time at first, like they could pretend it's only a game should someone discover them there_—all the while sinking. Struggling against it only seems to speed up the process, but Nixon can't help but think of that empty house and how soon that absence of life will be complete while Dick runs his thumb under his jaw.

And then he decides, _To hell with it all_, and jumps into it, hallucination or not.


	13. Folkin' Around

n Lewis Nixon's life, his passport will be layered with so many colored inks it could make Jackson Pollock proud, he'll have stepped foot on nearly every continent there is to step on, and drank in (_sometimes_) celebration at the top of too many skyscrapers, but he remembers that rural place in Pennsylvania just as much. One moment in his head he considers ducking his head and pulling away, while Dick smiles at him. Lew's hand holding his face after once they break apart—still nearly grasping for dear life—make it harder, but he manages a quirk of his mouth.

"Hey, Nix. Still here?"

"For now," he says, and the honesty tastes brittle and unsatisfactory. A half grimace flickers, his nerve buckles, and he removes his palms from Dick's face—too warm in the humid mouth of August heat, too twitchy, moving beneath his skin whenever he smiles. He can only withstand Dick's wise old gaze without being overwhelmed and cussing out loud. But moving away would be just as counterproductive. He chooses indecisiveness instead, gripping a fistful of shirt over Dick's shoulder blade to anchor himself.

He tilts his head at Nixon, and true to his saintly nature, knows exactly what he needs him to say. Nixon hates that he never knows, filled with useless languages and wasted memorizations. Latin and eighteen ways to translate a handshake instead of whatever Dick has that makes him so flawlessly human. Dick mimics Lew's previous move—his hand presses to the side of Nixon's face, thumb at the tucked corner of his mouth, fingertips rubbing his hairline.

"You'll be alright, Nix. No one is a kid forever." The warm circle of Dick's lips lands on his forehead, and Nixon shudders to keep from making some completely grateful noise. Dick doesn't shift away, but wraps both his arms around Nixon's shoulders to complete the embrace. "Your family can't control you forever."

Nixon closes his eyes and lets out a little curl of half-panicked laughter. "Nice try, Dick," he says. But whatever bit of lightness he'd feigned disappears a moment later, brow furrowing tightly. "She'll rip everyone apart as soon as we leave. Every last goddamned thing she found wrong with you and your family will come flying out as soon as we get in the car. All the way back. And I'll grit my teeth and say nothing and get shipped off to Purgatory with a curriculum." He sighs and lets himself slip. "Fucking hell."

When he finally opens his eyes again, Dick is grinning at him. The rarity of the expression doesn't excuse it.

"I don't find this funny," Nixon says flatly.

"It's not."

"Then wipe that smirk off your face. It's annoying."

Unconvinced with such a mediocre attempt at sourness—with Nix wrapped possessively around him in return, gripping his shirt like the action might pleasantly interrupt the passage of time—Dick has to kiss him, just to avoid offending him more with a laugh. "You can't do anything that would make me hate you, Nix," he says, in a space where neither of them seem actually separately alive from each other. "Remember that in Purgatory." And then he does laugh, and Nixon grabs him by the neck and tastes his mouth to make him shut up.

Dick's tongue is more like a shocked counterattack than when Nix runs his own against his teeth, but the intention doesn't alter the peel-some-paint sensation. Fingers clench, and Dick, always cautious without ever being timid, takes the pressure as a signal of 'Easy, boy,' and withdraws. There's a pair of blue-green eyes watching him, he's sure—he instead focuses on the carnally excruciating part of Dick's mouth hovering near. Nix's unsure what he's wearing on his face: dumbstruck arousal or something with the smallest amount of dignity; Dick presses on, regardless. There may even be a half-clumsy edge of hurry in the motion.

A few missteps—the gasping, forgot to stop for oxygen, crushing mouths together—the accidental biting of a tongue or lip, though, moments later, seemed a good thing—and it was, as in everything, a rhythm they both seemed to instinctively know. A flicker of red hair tickles his forehead and Nixon nearly laughs, but doesn't risk fracturing the connection. Nixon grips the cord of his shoulder to balance as he tugs Dick's Sunday best out from where it'd been neatly tucked. He draws five fingertips deliberately slow from the tip of his sternum, down to the dividing line of a leather belt.

Dick fights back a groan, instead choosing to break the kiss and bite his lip, still holding Nix's face with both hands and bumping noses. "Lew—"

"That's my name," he returns quietly but with definite self-satisfaction. "Not even close to wearing it out."

"I haven't done this much." The breathless edge in his voice unravels him. Nixon's fingers tense up, gripping a belt loop.

"Liar. You could knock anyone you wanted off their feet." Nixon says, and Dick, eyes still closed, laughs almost nervously.

"Still on your feet, though. Annoying, really," he murmurs, brushing his thumb along the once-bruised landscape of Lew's lips with all the careful interpretation of a blind man.

Nixon drives all thoughts—including curriculum, foreign languages, and every unhappy family memory—from his mind and focuses himself on the here and now, lifting slightly onto his toes to give Dick an almost chaste kiss. A hiss of a sigh escapes the older boy, relieved, until Nixon breaks it and rolls his hips into Dick's.

"_Jesus_," he whines. Nixon celebrates the victory by loosening his belt and placing the flat of his palm just below his navel and feeling the seemingly unflappable Lancaster native lurch at the simple touch. Dick presses his forehead against Nix's shoulder and searches for a deep breath Nixon won't let him keep.

But, as many times as they've met like this, fear of being caught always divided them reluctantly from one another. Today, sun-drunk and already missing each other, Dick says his name with an emotion he'd never even glimpsed under willow trees with blue-dressed girls and Nixon kisses him and pushes his shirt up around his chest, urging it off. Reciprocity is the unspoken rule—a freckled mouth nuzzles its way greedily around the collar of Nixon's shirt once his own falls to the ground. He swears there's even a trace of pleased laughter when he lurches and very nearly bucks at teeth nipping against his collarbone.

"Shit, hold on a second," he grits out. There's a very undignified but very happy noise waiting in the pit of his throat when Dick starts mouthing down his sternum, holding him as tightly as both can stand. He pushes him away for a moment, cursing as he fumbles around the buttons of his own shirt. "Goddamn biting horse," Nixon accuses. He glances up through his bangs at Dick and smiles. Ruffled by eager, curious hands, mouth pink from use, grinning mischievously, Lew is not like anyone he's ever known. The hay bales in the barn won't be the only empty things in his absence, he realizes, and painfully so.

Dick's patience leaves him and grabs Lew so roughly that he mews out in a little sound of pain and surprise, both slipping and falling to the ground together. Young things—they recover immediately and seek whatever they touch of each other all at once. Nixon won't even feel the bruise he acquires there, falling awkwardly on a half-buried rock, for another few hours—and then in full force.

But until then, they are rutting teenagers and there's hardly anything short of shelling that'll convince them of anything else. Dick is sucking crudely but eagerly on his neck as soon as they settle together, and that undignified noise lets loose. A gut-deep noise, Nixon reluctantly lets it go, rubbing absent circles across Dick's chest and the faint color of freckles there as he hovers above. Dick moans happily in return—though his seems infinitely more graceful even when he buries it in Nixon's bare neck. "Nix, I've never really—"

"Dick, you have to stop talking. That's the first step," Nixon quotes and quickly wets his lips.

They both reach for each other at the same moment and Nixon bites down gently on Dick's bottom lip to further illustrate his point. He reaches between the planes of their bodies and, with a thrill as sharp as a fishing hook's point, traces a few fingertips along the arousal in his jeans Nixon can't help but notice (_and reciprocate, as is the unspoken rule_). Knees buckle, and Dick swears. Compelled, he repeats the motion, this time pairing the trailing touch with an emphatic grind of his hips. Dick says it again, and grabs his free hand, nearly crushing it. Nixon can hardly recall what word it was—too fixated on the strange, wonderful music he can elicit and every red and white sensation it brings—but it was some gruff groan of a little word he'd never normally hear. He's flattered and honored and in love—another thing he won't immediately take the time to notice, but it will later return in full force.

Nixon uses the opportunity to turn the tables and get more comfortable. Dick most graciously lets himself be turned to the ground, laughing a little, breathless laugh and letting his head fall to the dirt. "Come on, off," Nixon says, tugging at the leg of his jeans as he kneels at his feet. "We're going swimming, remember?" Dick obliges, kicking them away with aid. Nixon manages the clarity of mind to drop it somewhere in the vicinity the rest of the pile with a wonderful clothes-deprived distraction, before he crawls back in a more comfortable position above him. For the first time, there's trepidation in Dick's expression, though he does his best to smother it through a flushed face and happily clenched jaw. It's as faint as the noise a moth makes as it flutters away from a light.

"Dick," Nixon says, bending down to kiss his navel, "_relax_."

And then, wetting his palm on the passage, he reaches down and touches him.

"Jesus Christ!" Dick barks out, all at once jumping away from the sensation and arching into it. He finally breaks eye contact to let his head roll back. The curse rattles out into a groan, and Nixon can't help but smile and revel in the effectiveness of a few fingertips running up along the shaft of his cock, conjecturing the effect of more with a half-wicked grin. Dick's already giving a healthy go at writhing—as much as he can ever really seem vulnerable, even while jawing for mutely for air, arching into the touch—and Nixon wraps his fingers tight and squeezes, traveling at an excruciatingly slow, leisurely pace. "Nix—oh, _god_…"

"Blasphemy? I would have never expected that from a wholesome boy like you," Nixon teases him, jerking faster, but with only minimal improvement. He himself, still clothed and more absorbed elsewhere, feels embarrassingly close—but then again, no blue dress, no matter how curvaceous the figure it hung on, compares to Dick Winters in a patch of grass, kicking up clods with a restless leg, occasionally braving his eyes open to look at him. Nixon would stop to count the freckles now that everyone would be easily found and catalogued with his lips, but the blood rushing to Dick's skin obscures too many. Dick wriggles around beneath him, requesting 'faster' in an amusing but poised way, and clenches Nixon's other hand tighter.

"Lew," he gasps out. "I—mean it… Lew. Please."

Nixon grins, and, just because he can, exercises a whim of cruelty—he stops. Dick grits his teeth and does his best not to make a desperate noise.

Nixon releases his grip, pausing to unzip and wriggle out of his own jeans, but Dick—who has misplaced his patience—barely waits for him. There are four hands fighting to most quickly shed his clothes, and, with Dick's mouth searching for his on every part near his mouth, Nixon drops behind if only by cruel distraction. Dick sits up until Nixon is half kneeling in his lap, a pair of skinny arms hanging around his waist. Teenaged and dosed by the sunlight, they fall back together in an eager pile once Nixon kicks off his jeans, ready

"Ow! God_damn_ it, Dick!" Nix cries out a moment later, rubbing his side. "Watch your knee…"

Dick wants to stifle a laugh, but the half-petulant expression on his face, lips turned out with a wince, demands it. It only sours further when he does, and Nixon flattens him to the ground as punishment. "Sorry, Nix," he murmurs happily, drawing his thumb across his cheek. "C'mere."


	14. Now From the After

When Dick asks what he's going to do back home, Lewis laughs bitterly and looks out across the paddock. Bitter because Dick's violated some unspoken request in asking, crossed some faintly drawn line of division that keeps the now from the after.

Impatient and sullen, he sits on the railing ringing the cow pen on the Winters' farm, silent once that line is crossed, that small but important promise broken. Half of his sour expression is due to the intense sunlight he squints beneath, though. A thin, bright ring of light crowns his slightly overgrown dark hair and there's a moment Dick folds his lips politely in on themselves just to resist a smile or laugh—even a puff of breath is enough to tip Nixon off, a boy who can sometimes be too observant for his own good. He looks a too-young prince left to govern an uncomfortable throne, leaning against the barn where the railing meets it, scowling equally at whatever cow lumbers too near and whatever weighty idea is rolling about in his mind. And, true to that sharp-eyed nature of his, Nixon catches him watching and turns to squint at him.

"What?"

Dick camouflages his tight-lipped smile by quickly ducking his head, only hoping his reflexes are quicker than Nixon's powers of inspection. He separates the bale at his feet and pitches a few green-yellow flakes of hay over into the pen. He loops the excess twine around his elbow and hand as the young heifers trot over first. Nixon is still staring at him—he can hear the displeased rhythm of his heel knocking the loose middle railing as he waits for Dick to acknowledge something.

The typical late-August drought has dried the once mired ground around the water trough until the earth is pocked like a war-torn strip of France. The cows trod carefully closer, their broad, runny noses twitching in interest. Even the elderly cow who seems completely perplexed and fascinated by Nixon's presence, and spends a great deal of energy trying to get close to him even he mocks and insults her ancestors, turns and plods towards the food. Nixon watches her low-hanging udders knock her lumbering ankles and grimaces.

"I think I've just seen my mother naked," he says, when Dick looks up. They both laugh and the cow gathers up a mouthful, oblivious.

The first flakes are claimed by a hungry few. When the other cows flick their tails impatiently, Dick makes quick work of another bale, slicing the twine with a flick of his pocketknife. Nixon's still quietly basking in his own cleverness when Dick brings it back up—the after to this event that's been their summer. "What's prep school like?" he asks casually and stops to pull the rotten hay from the bottom of the flake before tossing it.

"Boring. Regimented," Nixon grumbles. "Everybody's somebody's son—make friends, kiss up, perpetuate business connections. An overall productive place. They'd just _love_ you."

Dick smirks, and there's a little pleasant pressure in his chest. Nixon's words somehow continue to ring in his mind—but he chooses to credit too much sun compacted by too little to drink. "And they don't love you?"

"Good looks only get you so far in the world, Dick."

"And money takes you the rest of the way?"

Nixon smiles absently, watching a calf nervously totter through the hay until someone nudges him along, not knowing he's being watched, too.

"I don't believe I'd be cut out for a place like that, Nix," Dick says, leaning against the railing. "And are you calling me boring?"

"_And_ productive," Nixon defends himself. "And that makes two of us, trust me. But they never made a public school that could do a Nixon justice, as good ole Pop used to say." His fingers tap impatiently on the railing, eager for a cigarette. "When he wasn't too busy to impart some heartwarming fatherly advice, that is."

"Would a home cooked meal do a Nixon justice?" Dick asks. He clears his hands of dirt on the knees of his jeans. "Mother asked if you wanted to spend supper with us tonight. She's cooking a honeyed ham, so she means it."

It seems to be much easier to clear the hay from his hands than any of things that Lewis cannot seem to retell without a scowl from his mind. He glances over at that uncomfortable heir to a far-away throne, and Nixon's already looking back. Whatever he'd been concentrating on, he quickly shakes it away and a grin quickly overtakes him.

"I couldn't refuse a lady's request." He begins laughing even before he can manage out, "Or your mother's, for that matter—" but Dick knows by the curl of his mouth nothing good can come out of it and is there to promptly push him off his perch. Happily to dethrone him—and despite the sound of surprise he yelps out, nearly tumbling face first into the mud—Dick knows he's happily dethroned. Just not happy to get dirty. Relieved of his crown by dirt stains on his knees and two hands covered in mud from catching himself, Nix stands up and holds still for a shocked moment.

"That's it, Nix," Dick says to Nixon's wide-eyed stare. "You drove me to it."

"You bastard," he mutters in return. Surprise quickly turns to mischievousness, and he reaches out for Dick like some sopping bog creature from movies he sometimes saw on Saturdays for a nickel. "Come here."

Dick laugh-scoffs, tossing his head in return like some stubborn colt as he steps backwards and out of muddy reach. "No thanks."

Dark eyes flash at him, one corner of his mouth tilted wickedly. "Come here!"

"I may be mean, but I'm no fool, Lew."

"Damn right you're mean," Nixon says as he attempts to clap the mud from his hands, pressed against the fence and drawing a few, pointed stares from the cows crowded behind him. When Dick shows no sign of coming nearer, he gives up and clamors over the fence. "But I forgive you. Don't you want to be forgiven?"

Dick clicks his pocketknife close and pats his hands clean on his hips, turning to walk back across the yard. "Do it from over there," he says, waving over his shoulder. "I've got work to do before supper."

Nixon shakes his head, but lets him go without retribution. He washes his hands at the water pump, ignoring the unhappy, snotty snorts of the overly friendly cow as he draws farther and farther away.

\---

He stays too late. Darkness creeps in sometime between a change of clothes and the comforting rhythm of grace as it echoes from every side of the table. Very little concern actually registers until midway through supper he gazes past Dick's profile to the inky black in the window and realizes, with a feeling that is both bitter and contented, that he doesn't actually belong there. Not that there is any soul at the farmhouse down the road to truly miss him—but Nixon knows half the battle of manners is never overstaying welcome. The temptation to stay, though, is deep.

He doesn't mind the careful but fair evaluation he notices in Dick's father's eyes. Where judgment and expectation normally lay in the distant stare of Nixon's father, there is instead caution that steadily warms to appreciation and even an edge of good humor as the conversation continues. He's more and more admiring of the earthly wisdom and firm gentleness of his mother, even when she scolds Ann for fussing vainly with her food. And Ann—Nixon even finds a strange reservoir of tolerance for her thinly veiled attempts at flirtation across the table. The dark clumps of quickly applied mascara—no doubt snuck from her mother's collection, considering her rather tender age—give her away immediately. Prep-schooled girls bat their lashes with much more lethal technique and Nixon is near impervious to her shy, off-tempo attempts.

Nixon's elite background is never a topic, never an issue. The conversation becomes little more political than talk of the upcoming harvest and hopeful profits. Mostly they discuss what cow won't make it to see the first snow when the freezer is bare, the steadily increasing number of children in Ann's class, and whether Nixon's enjoying himself in Lancaster so far.

And when Dick touches his knee to Nixon's beneath the small table he barely restrains himself from falling into something he barely understands. He nods to answer the question and smiles. They're a little quieter and simpler than the glamorous crowds he's socialized before. But Nixon appreciates that there's no bickering discussion of politics behind performing smiles or someone swooping out of the kitchen to take his half-cleared plate in preparation for the next course.

He was also unaware that there is more than one kind of milk—and he's apparently lived on the watery end of the spectrum—after Dick encourages him to try a glass of homemade buttermilk. The result is a scrunched nose and a nervous gulp. Nixon's not sure anything that thick could ever make it out of the cow, let alone safely through his own system. But the gentle laughter around the table as a result of his sour face is well worth the churning stomach later.

Dick convinces him it's too dark to walk home and there's room enough for him to stay a night, but it's his mother who points out her joints have forecast rain all day. He knows it's more impolite to refuse stubbornly than to accept their generosity and offers to help wash dishes in return. Dick and Ann—both seemingly equally excited to have a guest—walk into the kitchen ahead of him, arms stacked with dishes. He stops to glance back at Dick's mother before following. When her normally carefully maintained smile opens up a little, almost affectionately, his head feels strangely light and unsteady.

"Thank you again, Mrs. Winters," he says gladly, despite the growing worry she's glowing because of something she _knows_ rather than anything Nixon's done tonight.

"You're most welcome, Lewis," she says, gathering up the salt and pepper one-handedly and the emptied serving plate with the other. "I'm glad you came for supper."

"It was my pleasure actually," Nixon answers. He adjusts his grip on his stack of dishes anxiously—_for god's sake, I was less nervous at White House dinners than this_, he thinks. "I was told it wasn't a meal to miss. Everything tasted wonderful."

She smiles brightly then, before bowing her head to continue clearing the table. "Please don't flatter me. Dick probably exaggerated my cooking just to convince you to come, you know," she says. "He's been asking all week if I could make my best dish for you."

It's a comment that haunts him for the rest of the night—_and the unknowable warmth to her smile as Dick, as if summoned by the mention of his name across the house, calls out for Nix to come help_. Especially when he rolls to the edge of Dick's goose-feather bed and blinks down into the dark at the redhead's murky shape, nowhere near sleep or anything pleasantly unconscious.

Even Nixon's feet are lodged up against the railings at the end of the bed—he can't imagine how a string-bean kid like Dick Winters hasn't developed a stoop lying in his undersized bed every night. Laid up on a blanket and a pillow on the floor beside the bed, long legs splayed happily out, the peaceful, still expression on his face makes Nixon hesitate before speaking up. "Hey," he murmurs. "Dick."

The happy victim of a large, warm dinner and just the right amount of summer heat, the only response is a sleepy noise from low in his chest. Nixon reaches down and combs a few fingers through his hair—the nearest (_colorbright, always warm and important to the touch_) part of him he can reach—and all Dick's limbs stir in a drowsy motion like the pulse of an ocean wave before he lifts his head off the floor and squints at him.

"Lew?"

"Can't sleep."

Dick slowly rubs the side of his face which had laid on the pillow and props himself up on one arm. "What's wrong?" he asks in a sleep-rough voice. When Nixon fails to answer beside a continued, conflicted silence, Dick kicks off whatever little blanket still covers him and motions for Nix to make room on his bed—a request Nixon does his best to fulfill, though his back ends up pressed against the wall. Forsaken are all thoughts of worry for the hope that the intoxicating something in summer-warmed freckled skin might lull him away from conscious pain. A midnight trudge to the bathroom past the half-ajar door might reveal them, but Nixon finds the closest part of Dick's face and kisses a thank you just below his eye as he wraps around him. Dick heaves a slow, oceanic sigh, body sluggish with dreaming, and links his arms around Nixon's back.

"Need a bedtime story?" he mumbles while a nose nuzzles into his shoulder. Nixon snorts against his skin, which Dick takes a veiled and reluctant, "Yes," because he retells the story of how he accidentally grazed his father while hunting until he falls asleep, somewhere right before the punch line. Nixon shakes his head, no where nearer to sleep now—stomach lurching unhappily with the thought he's going back soon, Dick snoring quietly in his ear—and admits, "I'll miss you so fucking much," when Dick's gone too deep to hear.


	15. An Old Silver Revolver and Razed Fields

Dick dreams that Nixon is lying dead beside him, and his sister is wearing a white ceramic dress with painted blue flowers at the foot of the bed—the same pattern as his mother's china. He wakes with a start in the place between dark and sunrise. He instinctively nudges the body next to him to see where the truth really lies. The back-story of his dream and the information of now are still tangled and Dick tries not to jump to conclusions until the lines are completely uncrossed. Not even the slow swell of Nixon's chest pressed against his own convinces him fully—Dick waits until Nix lets out a sleepy order to stop fidgeting to accept it. Then he lets out a sigh and lets his head fall to the pillow again.

In the dream, Nixon had been clutching two things in his hands, curled up like a child against him. In one hand a toy pistol—an old silver revolver that Dick _hoped_ would only click harmlessly—and the other a book bound on all four sides. He'd known through that murky dream logic that Nixon had been dead exactly two days, and in another day they were going to bury him, whether Dick had let go or not.

_And Ann, in a low singsong voice, repeating, "Never goddamn nervous. You aren't nice. That's the first step."_

He chuckles in the quiet of his room, noticing that Nixon has somehow managed to take all the covers without really untangling himself from Dick.

He lifts his hand to move Lew's dark hair off his forehead. The response is another wordless mumble and Nixon kicking absently in his sleep. He can only hope the dreaming is better on his side of the bed. Dick then closes his eyes and just lets himself separate from thought for a few more hours. Otherwise he'll remember that sunrise brings the last day of August and when September rolls in there's no guarantee Nixon will still be there. And Nixon will be upset enough for the both of them, he knows.

Dick expects the half-avoidant smirk, the extra carelessness in his gait, even the cynic edge to all his words as they toss a ball behind the house the next morning after breakfast. He can appreciate Nixon's sometimes bratish responses to pain and duress probably spring from a very opulent but very unfulfilled life, even though they disappoint and grieve him all at once. Dick can't pretend to know the depths of crimes his own blood has committed against him, but when he watches Nixon watch his mother approach, he doesn't expect the cold, almost disgusted fury in his expression. With a carefully drawn brow, Dick catches the ball Nix had tossed the moment before in his father's slightly oversized glove, then looks over his shoulder.

The polished Ford jumps down the tracks in the dusty driveway with a purpose. Nixon scoffs behind him, laughing a little only out of derision. Dick doesn't turn around, but he hears it, loud and clear and heavy on him. "Found me."

He doesn't turn, tries not to encourage the bitterness in his voice. "Your mother was probably just worried about you. You didn't exactly try hard to inform her where you went for the night."

"It's something of a family tradition not to tell each other absolutely anything," Nixon says. He punches the palm of Dick's glove absently. "I guarantee you she's not stopping in for lemonade."

Dick presses his lips together in uncertainty. He can't stop noticing the sharp edge of fear in Nixon's smallest motions. When he does open his mouth, Nixon shakes his head and cuts him off. "No, I can go myself, it'll be fine," he says. "I'm a big boy—I tie my shoes and everything." Without looking at him, he hands Dick his glove and walks past, headed across the lawn to the mouth of the driveway, where his mother is stepping out of the car in a pair of heels.

She stands and waits for him, as cold as her clothes are tailored.

"Nix—"

"Just be a minute. Keep it warm for me," he answers with a wave of his hand.

Dick also doesn't expect the almost lifeless way Nixon stands in front of his mother while she talks—ostensibly upset about her son running off to "_god-knew where_" for a night. Despite the distance, Dick sees his normal, undimmed spark of honesty—sometimes crude and challenging and sometimes wounded—shift to hide behind something. He nods to whatever she says with a short, anxious motion. Having gotten her apology, she climbs back into the car, reminds him pointedly of something once more, and drives off.

Nixon makes the journey back more quickly, rolling his eyes all the while over a string of muttered curses. Dick gives him a small smile in the hopes it'll remedy something—not a smile fueled by joy but worry. Nixon doesn't look up to see it, even when he walks straight past.

There's a familiar clatter of the white-painted screen door swinging shut that draws Dick's attention for a moment, allowing Nixon to gain ground as he trudges unhappily off. To where, Dick can only guess—but he turns to look instead at the front of the house. His mother is there, squinting in the sun after the brand new Ford leaving the drive. Straight from the kitchen sink, now watching the dust settle in the car's wake.

She's drying her hands on her apron when she looks at him in return. The distance prevents him from seeing her expression clearly, but after a moment of mutual consideration, Dick turns to follow Nixon and she watches him go without a word.

He's not surprised Nixon's always carrying some sort of intoxicant with him these days. He's just surprised to see how much cigarette is burnt away by the time Dick catches up. He's fled to the slightly overgrown part behind the barn sheltered by a few trees, head bowed the whole way. Apparently unnoticed by all other parties, Dick believes he's known Nixon long enough and deep enough to see the internal shift in him these late summer days. Barely curtailed desperation moves his hand whenever he touches, whether it is to tap his carton of cigarettes loose, to rub the sweat from his brow, or to pull Dick by his forearm close enough to bury his face away from something in his shoulder.

He does his best to act unconcerned whenever he can, but Dick's there most of the time and he always ends up slipping up once or twice.

Nixon settles his back against the barn and eases himself down until he's sitting, legs lying crookedly out in front of him.

"What did she want?" Dick asks, when a minute passes and only the orange tip of his cigarette moves.

"Every first-born son of Israel," Nixon says angrily.

"Well," comes the half-tired answer, "we're both in the same boat, then." Dick decides that baseball and the rest of the day is going to have to wait a while—for at least one more cigarette, if he's feeling saintly enough to let it go—and sits down beside Nix behind the barn. "Or maybe just a basket set adrift in the reeds."

He even gets a little delayed laughter at his answer after a few minutes. Nixon's mind seems to be coming slowly around from wherever it had gone and eventually appreciates his reference. His muted laugh transfers across from where they touch—_elbows, knees, shoulders_—the benign and brotherly places during the day. They'll find the needful places when they feel a little safer and make sure whatever they can't say is understood.

Nixon finally pulls the cigarette from his mouth and gives a long, smoky exhale. "She wants me to go back when I'm done saying goodbye," he answers. But he takes another generous drag before he continues, and Dick waits.

He hangs his head and motions vaguely with his free hand. "Whenever _that_ will be… Pack up, head home, you know. School's due to start soon."

"That boring, productive place." Dick smiles. "It'll miss you if you don't go."

The scoff is marked by a thick puff of blue-tinged white smoke. "Not as much as I won't miss it."

Dick watches his toes with a faint smile, tapping them absently in the air. "I'd offer you a place to stay here, but the barn stalls are all full." But no real smile can he yet wrangle from Nixon, just the automatic twitch of his lips around the cigarette.

He stares into an unknowable distance, somewhere else and sitting there behind the barn at the same time. "Tomorrow—God_damn_, has it already been three months?"

"That's all the longer summer is, Nix," Dick points out calmly.

"Yeah, well, summer in Havana goes all fuckin' year long."

He's unable to keep his unhappiness neatly boxed and housed in storage miles away from him. He can't just fold it up and put it away whenever his parents and societal niceties demand it of him, and he can't do it now. Especially not now.

Not when Dick's looking so evenly at him, never judging, only watching and listening. He hates wondering if it's only when he looks Dick in the eye it'll feel like putting his feet up and finally getting a deep breath.

Nixon chooses to turn away and look out across the yard, nervously tearing a piece of long grass.

"I'll miss you," Dick says a few minutes later. Nix closes his eyes and pushes back against the force of something pushing out from his chest and the back of his eyes. He's not sure if he hears, "too," in there or only wants to hear it. It's so quiet and simple a statement it makes his sigh an overwhelming noise.

He doesn't have the nerve to answer him because he knows he'll embarrass himself if he opens his mouth. So, eyes still barred shut against the world and against himself, he leans across the gap and rests his head on Dick's shoulder behind the barn.

"You never unpacked, did you?"

"Not really."

Dick smirks and runs a few reverent fingertips along Nixon's wrist where the veins beat. "All the more time to say goodbye."

Lewis strolls back home so near to the beginning of the next day he thinks it's hardly worth the effort of crawling into bed only to be roused in a few hours by the help. His mother would be furious with him, no doubt—she'd trill about how _traumatic_ it'd been to not know where he'd been. But only as soon as she got all her beauty sleep. Nixon wished, grinning a Cheshire cat's grin, she _were_ awake and standing at the door and asking where he'd gone just to tell her that he'd been fucking another boy in the ripened corn fields. To see her reaction through an endorphin-laced filter would be _especially_ priceless.

Instead, he settles for smiling in a daze as he lumbers up the stairs and wonders how Dick's doing as he walks back homes. Will his father be pacing the floors in a disappointed scorn when he arrives? Will his mother join him there, or will she be awaiting him alone at the door with that smile—that all-knowing, quiet glow Dick has inherited—and a moderate punishment? They'd fallen asleep for a few hours after midnight in the fields before finally heading separate directions in the dark. Consequences were a mutual overwrite—they'd accept whatever punishment came their way. Not that they'd thought about anything like that while trying to say a proper goodbye.

Nixon remembers trying to smooth the pink imprints of corn stalks and leaves out of Dick's skin. He kicks off his shoes as he makes it up the stairs, and one clatters down a few steps in his carelessness. He pushes his door open, and there's a square of moonlight on his stack of hardly-touched luggage in the corner.

He falls bonelessly onto his bed and remembers the way Dick loved to rake his fingers across Nixon's navel and moan against his skin where his neck met his shoulder. He remembers Dick leading him to an old water stream now overgrown with grass, in the middle of the neighboring fields of ripe feeder corn. He remembers trying to remove the silk of a corncob for their dinner, and eventually handing it over to the more experienced party. He remembers it sensation by sensation until it's dreaming.

Then Dick is kneeling in a razed field, cradling a bridled horse by the bit, kneeling and pressing his forehead to it's own in a deeply reverent and pained gesture. Its skin is pale buckskin, and its hair dark, dark—lying with half of its body raised off weakly the ground. Nixon goes to him and counts the freckles on his bare back. He's using Dick's shoulder blade to rest his head when he wakes and tries to say, "1,481," before it all becomes his mother's feet thundering across the floor.

"Where _were_ you?" she barks immediately, pulling the pillow from his arms.

Nixon smiles sleepily. "Lancaster County," he answers, as if summer had all been a dream, and he laughs like it's just the funniest thing ever said.


	16. Summer's End

The cabinets of the kitchen had just been painted a fresh white last spring, and there were no ragged seams where the old coat had flaked off. When Dick was little and more often called Ricky, with a ruffle of hair, he stood at his mother's hip while she prepared food and ran his fingers along the exposed wood where paint chipped away. Now they seem so pure and radiant—glowing in some of the last long and youthful sunlight of the year as it comes in from all the open windows. His mother stands before the sink, her back to him, fastening her coppery hair onto her head.

It's a beautifully bright and still Saturday morning. Lew is going home. And here he sits, waiting for word of his punishment.

He's seated at the small kitchen table where his mother's morning cup of coffee remains, half-finished. Brief strings of laughter roll in through the open windows, Ann being free to chase the barn cat about the yard. He'd come home last night—_or early that morning, to be more accurate_—to a wholly unhappy mother at the doorstep and a very restrained but firm order to his room. She'd issued a decree of no dinner or breakfast until her temper had evened out and he'd had a stern talking-to. Her pointed silence until now has been more potent a warning than her any of her brisk words.

"Richard." He recognizes the warning in his full name and straightens his posture in response, blinking his eyes clear of memory. He focuses on her as completely as he can. She turns around to look at him and he looks back, determined not to let the feeling of haste color any of his actions, though it is there, reminding him that it could be _now_, as he anxiously blinks up at his mother, that Nix is climbing into a car and is gone. Though goodbyes are already exchanged—as begrudging as they were—Dick feels it's a waste to spend the day occupied with thoughts of seeing him off and hardly present. He's plagued by it, the way a room is haunted by danger even when the wasp nest is long since dry and empty.

He wants to see Nix once more, while he can.

There's very little trace of a smile in his mother's mouth as she considers him. But there's something less stern making a brief appearance when she says, "Don't let your father see you leave." She then turns back around and pats her hands white with flour, pressing flat a fresh clump of dough.

When Dick remains motionless at the table, mutely staring at her back, she speaks again. But it's now filled with nothing but uncompromising authority. "When you get back you will be grounded to the house for a week, when you are not at school and doing both your and your sister's chores. There _will_ be more if your father catches you."

He needs no more clarification than that. He won't question this untainted spark of clemency by questioning it. So, nodding obediently, he says a quiet, "Thank you," before slipping out the kitchen door.

By the time the screen door clatters close and his mother glances after him, he's hopped the fence and is cutting through the summer cow pasture to save time.

\---

For Nixon, it's a much less complicated process leaving the countryside than arriving. Much less violence. There's no blood on a perfectly white shirt to worry about, no painful stamp of disapproval from the locals left in his skin for all to read. Just two new model Fords waiting out in front of the porch.

He trudges downstairs that morning and watches the hired help carrying luggage toward the open front door, which is a hot, brightly lit shape all at once too far to reach and too close for comfort. Luckily, his mother shares his opinion on beauty rest. She's only been awake a little while longer, though just long enough to don her favorite newly bought outfit and fix her hair to perfection. It's probably their only common love: rising whenever they damn well feel like it. She and the obnoxious proxy of an aunt are dark shapes on the shaded porch, each drinking from a glass of iced tea and watching the work be done for them.

He's already begun to feel like it's all unreal, even as he stands within the frame of the door and squints out across the rolling green fields as far as he can see. That looking back on the places he's been all summer—where he's bled, swum, slept, gasped for air—are already feeling fragmented and surreal. When he gets home it will only be worse. When opulence and appearance is the rule, not effort and honesty; where he'll walk through furnished halls instead of tall grass and rows of crops. He can hardly believe he's actually going to miss the sweet, earthy smell of silage thick in the air when the sun sets, but he has the urge to turn and leave through the back door and feel it again. But Time is going to rob him slowly of the details, and it's a process he eagerly looks forward to.

He steps aside as the last of his luggage is carried past and stacked meticulously in the trunk and backseat of the second car. Nothing barring a miraculous change of heart in his mother—_who might lack the equipment for something like that_, he thinks—will change the fact he is expected to return from this vacation and again be squarely on a path that will bring pride and praise to the Nixon family—tempered by prestige and marked by excellence. Otherwise worded: nothing he's got a choice in.

_My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself  
Because it is hateful to thee._

"Had I it written, I would tear the word," Nixon mutters to himself. His mother has turned and now peers at him through the open door. He instinctively tries not to scowl and instead closes his eyelids briefly, as if blinking, and rolls his eyes behind them until he feels better.

"Lewis, we're going. Make sure you're ready. I'm not turning around if you've forgotten something," she says as he trudges out onto the porch, a half-hearted effort at best. "Have you packed everything from your room?"

He nods, refusing to meet her eyes. Instead, the heavy blanket of sunlight just beyond the comfort of the shade draws his attention, the humidity thick like breath on his skin. He watches the light glint on the cars' silver trim without a word.

"Don't slouch. You look terrible when you slouch," comes the inevitable criticism, and his aunt offers a similar half-sour face to agree. _She's only warming up_, he knows. "You're not going to act carelessly at school, you understand?"

"Yes, ma'am," Nix breathes, barely able to resist baring his teeth at her ugly tone.

He can't wait for the long-winded, self-opinionated retelling of their time in the countryside, over dinners that feature more courses than blessings. Nixon knows unadorned truth is nowhere as enjoyable as gossip, so she'll find every flaw and loophole in the people they met for the sake of a dramatic story, prefacing with the all-exculpating, "God bless him." He couldn't stand to hear what she actually thought of her son's fast new friend—and perhaps _too_ fast, if she had really ever bothered to stop and pay attention. Even in imagining the scenario—'_very well-mannered, despite such a common upbringing,' she'd declare, to a reception of agreeing nods, people who have never even _seen _him_—his blue blood turns hot.

With all the enthusiasm of a man condemned to walk before the firing squad, Nixon bids goodbye to his Aunt Mabel and tries not to act as stiff and aloof as he feels when she encircles him in a hug of misplaced affection. When he's free, he stalks over to the open car and stands beside it. While he waits for his mother to finish her farewell, he leans against the door, tilts his head back and closes his eyes. Too much sunlight the day before has burnt the tops of his shoulders and the ridges of his cheeks, and his skin thrums as it continues to burn beneath his clothes. He winces in the sun again today, squinting his eyes close against the overwhelming pink-orange light filling his eyelids. He waits for something to happen.

And when it doesn't, he feels worse for having hoped for it.

That low, long feeling of anticipation remains even when his mother finally turns to wave her final goodbye to Mabel—uttering some empty word about coming to see her again, things Nixon knows in all likelihood will never happen—and bids him into the car. The engine roars when he finally and reaches for the door handle. The metal is broiling hot to the touch, another part of him that is burning away for a moment. As much as he'd love to feel distant from the whole event, moving on only perfect automation, he's indelibly aware of it all. He climbs into the backseat and the driver glances at them in the mirror. His mother is already neatly straightening out her dress. He pulls the door shut and settles gingerly against the leather seats. The car rumbles into movement, jolts uncomfortably into the ruts in the driveway, then turns out onto the road.

As equally cruel as the welcoming one—not unlike a mouth, tasting of grapes, of just-ripe corn on the cob, touching kind and joking tough—the Lancaster farewell committee is the endless blue sky through the window.

\---

Dick dreams of his sister running away at night in her Sunday best, walking down endless dank cellar stairs, and deer walking in funeral processions through the woods the week after Nixon leaves. More often, though, he comes through the fields to find it's many years removed and where the entire horse farm had stood, and for a summer housed far-hailing royalty, is nothing but an overgrown foundation. Arriving fifty years too late in recurring dreams is far outstripped by ten minutes too late in actuality.

There had been nothing he could do about it. He'd simply turned where he stood, unable to watch the thin clouds of kicked-up dust marking their trail fade anymore, and walked home, head hung and sun turning the skin of his neck red.


	17. When You Were East

Summer gives way then to the cold snap of autumn, the warning that winter will soon come to wipe the slate clean for another distant-seeming spring. Summer's end has always held a note of poignancy—days of freedom traded for schoolwork and watching the clock—but the transition this year is worsened, Dick finds. Crops will be harvested, green singed by cold, skies dim with lifeless cloud, and Nixon's absence remaining like some unclosed wound.

As September dips into October, there are fewer reminders of Lew's presence and the distance between seems more and more indelible. Or, Dick sometimes corrects himself, the norm had always been distance—existences separate from each other, opposite by birth and nature—and they'd simply regained that norm. Their summer had been an accidental pinching of the strings to bring them together. They'd simply snapped back into place, lest they distend too far, fray and break.

The teeth of grass against his bare feet revives toes submerged in water and a handful of grapes, but with the cold quiets the most visceral bite of memories. The once half-empty room where he could find a snoozing and peaceful lump kicking off the blankets, head buried beneath a pillow, is wholly empty now. He returns the routine of his life before the abrupt arrival of a well-to-do with a bloodied nose, and he notices the quiet. No talkative shadow hanging about, no knowing flash of dark eyes when he turned to look. Dick finds himself in the misdst of conversation and momentarily compelled to turn to his side and look for someone to confide to, or just give him a smirk and shrug. At first it's enough to absently brush the feeling off; focusing on the person and the present event is enough to tide him over for a while. But it becomes more persistent in time.

When it's dark, more and more he wonders if his storytelling's needed east of him, and there's an empty bed and a Nixon combing the halls for unguarded cigarettes.

Nixon exercies every vice he can get his hands on to occupy himself. Studies also keep him busy enough, but once schoolwork is finished and teenage depravity gone trite, he can't bring himself to simply bask in a job well done or indulge another wicked impulse. It's only another goddamned report, another test, another demand he prove his measurable worth. Just another broken rule, another impulsive risk, usually for the briefest of illicit pleasures.

The difficulty in memorizing Latin charts comes no where near the difficulty he has in not reliving at every warm breath of summer that settles into the room a touch of a hand burning like high-noon sun. Someon laughs too loud, lips spread too wide, and he'll recall a smile that was a country onto its own, language and geography unique. He can all day be schooled in things that hardly matter without real trouble, but when he wakes up at night and is ripped from a sunny place, he feels wronged by the whole world and he couldn't give a damn if he wrongs everyone in return. His headmaster, an imperious and exacting man, would discipline someone with a half-pleasured look to him. Nixon would remember that violent delight on a different face, with the unbearable tenderness of fingertips inspecting a bruise just a ghost behind. In every action lay a potential trap.

He cannot wash the feeling Dick brought him away, a thing made all the more potent in it's abrupt absence. Nor can he set loose that longing—_homesickness, in a strange way_—in the touch of a curved and pretty girl, who mixes a silly, nervous little laugh with a gulp of arousal. He pointedly does not compare her to a boy in Pennsylvania and tries to transfer it all away from him by kissing her and clutching her hips close. But even then the dim light through his closed eyelids reminds him.

School is less fun than he remembers.

They are both dreaming about summer when the first real snowfall arrives in late October. Miles away Nixon continues sleeping, but a gallop of bare feet on the floorboards announce Ann before she near plunges through Dick's halfway open bedroom door that morning. She is fumbling to tie her knit red scarf around her neck all the while. "Wake up!"

Usually a prompt riser—awake even before his father some mornings—Dick lingers a moment longer where he lays. It is a Saturday, after all, and even he can appreciate a good, lazy morning. Especially when, just beyond the hazy barrier between him and sleep, waits a hunching, sullen figure smoking behind the barn.

Then she pounces and rattles out his plesant dreaming. Groggily he sits halfway up, greeted by an ecstatic smile on the edge of his bed and the luminous light of winter snow glowing in the room. "Come on, Dick! While the snow's still cold!" she giggles. When he doesn't immediately stand, she tugs him eagerly along by the wrist.

"Give me a moment, please," he protests, tugging against the up-sweeping river current that is his sister this morning. "Even I'm not awake yet."

"Well, hurry up! I'm going outside, with or without you!"

She runs back out of the room, a still merrily laughing blur. The sound of her snow boots thudding against the floor echoes through the hallways and fills them with noise of life. Thud, thud, thudding like blood within a vein, eagerly bound for all destinations. A faint smile rests on his face as he rummages for his winter clothing. He shudders as his bare feet touch the floorboards and they feel near icy against his skin. He shifts his weight gingerly, flexing his cold toes to restore warmth, until they are safely covered in wool socks. When he's fully ready to plunge into the first snowfall, standing in the doorway, he hesitates. The light of sunlight behind silver cloud paints the world a heavenly white—it has been a significant snow fall, enough to blanket the ground in a few solid inches and clothe the pine trees. His breath, already faintly visible even at the kitchen window, curls against the glass and fogs. He hears Ann's squeal of joy as she falls backwards into the snow and smiles.

It's not the first time he wishes Nix were there with him—"_Christ, you woke me up for snow? Sensible creatures are hibernating through this stuff_," he thinks he'd say—but he opens the door and jumps out into the white despite it.

Just as summer will come again, he knows they will see each other again. As sure as there is grass beneath the snow waiting to grow at spring's first hot breath.

Nixon, however, is still sleeping, cheek pressed against the mattress as he wraps around half his pillow, shivering slightly beneath his too-light blanket as snow collects at his windowsill and a few vividly remembered fingertips touching his face.


End file.
